From Sea to Shining Sea Read Online Free Page B

proper, marked by good manners and politeness all ’round.”
    He leaned back and tilted his head. “In faith, girl! If it’s that sort o’ weddin’ y’ want, a
tame
one, well, why d’ye keep askin’
me
t’be here for it?”
    “Jo jee! Jo jee!” Billy called through the laughter. “Tell me bout wiver wats an’ bear-biters! Pwease!”
    “Hey, yes! I promised you a yarn, didn’t I, young man? I promised to tell you about the finest Indian chief of all. River rats and bear-biters some other time. This is a better story!”
    Billy scooted low in his chair and put his hands between his thighs and scrunched his neck protectively down between his shoulders and shivered once, his mouth hanging open. He glanced once at his mother and father to reassure himself of their nearness and then waited to hear the wonders. The rest fell still and watched George’s mouth as he paused to form the opening words to his tale. Edmund, Dick, and Johnny, though hunters and farmers on a man’s scale, were now open-faced boys; Lucy was squirming, and Elizabeth silently slid down from her chair to go and stand by her mother’s skirt. Even the parents were expressionless now. All faces were cleared of whatever had been in them, ready to receive. Beyond the doors of the bright room, dark shapes moved and yellow eyes gleamed; even the Negroes were listening. George raised a big, long-fingered hand and made his eyes look wild. Then he began, in a voice deep and dark as a cave.
    “Oftimes, out there in that country, ye’ll
think
you’re alone, all, all, alone, but y’re
not
! You’re always bein’ watched!”
    Billy shivered and scooted so far down in his chair that only his eyes showed above the edge of the table.
    “It was like that, the first day I met Tah-gah-JU-tay, the great MING—o.” He put a deep resonance on the syllables of the strange Indian words, making them sound most savage and ominous. Mrs. Clark bit her lips to keep from smiling. She was hearing her own storytelling style, pauses and intonations. George had learned yarn-spinning from her bedtime stories of long ago.
    “It was a perfect fall day,” he went on, lightening his tone and making a panoramic sweep with both hands, his sleeve fringes swaying hypnotically. “Yellow meadows and fallen leaves all warm with a hazy sun. Ripe berries and wild grapes everywhere. Y’ know the kind of a day.
    “I was on a great, sunny meadow, overlooking a curve of the mighty O-HI-o, with my compass and chain and notebook, a-layin’ out terrain. I didn’t suspect there was a human soul insidea hundred miles! It was so
still
! All I’d hear was that
rustle, rustle
, when a breeze goes through dry leaves. Or now and then,
tht
!
tht
! a walnut or acorn fell. Sometimes I’d hear squirrels’ feet rustlin’ in the leaves—leastways, I
thought
they were—and once in a while:
    “FFFTHTHTHTHRRRRR!” He startled them almost out of their chairs, and in the pantry someone gasped and dropped something. “… I’d flush a quail.”
    “Oooey,” breathed Edmund. “That sounded so real my trigger finger twitched.” George barely managed not to laugh at Edmund’s remark, biting inside his cheek to keep a serious face.
    “Shhh!” said Annie, who seemed now to have forgotten even her wedding.
    “So there I was,” George continued, “in all that space and quiet, just workin’, concentrating, as ye have to do when you’re surveying. I’d poke that old maple Jacob’s staff in the ground, and I’d put my brass compass atop it, tighten down th’ thumbscrew. Y’ know how brass’ll shine in the sun. I love that. Then I’d sight along to a spot, then I’d pace out, payin’ out those thirty-three feet o’ chain, and stake down the end.” They could see him doing it, all that complicated calculating and measuring. “And an interesting notion occurred to me just then,” he went on, “that these brass and wood instruments o’ mine were tools,
tools
, mind ye, for