The True Account Read Online Free Page B

The True Account
Book: The True Account Read Online Free
Author: Howard Frank Mosher
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mother with a brindled cow for her dairy, and my father with a padded vise of his own invention, in which to clamp his head when the world was too much with him.
    One day in March, when the sap had just started to flow in our maple-sugar orchard, my uncle strapped on his snowshoes and said he planned to go to the top of Kingdom Mountain and reconnoiter our route to the Pacific. It seemed safe enough to let him conduct this reconnaissance on his own, so I went to work with my father, the
Monitor
being due out the next day. That evening, however, we were met at the door by my most anxious mother, who had just discovered a note from the private informing us that he had left for Boston to raise money for our trip.
    My father’s hands were already fluttering upward, like two large moths toward a candle. Pressing his head down from the top, as if to prevent himself from taking flight, he said, “Fetch me my clamp, Ti.”
    I ran for the Christmas vise. After my mother and I had affixed this apparatus to his head, screwing it down very tightly, he seemed to experience some relief.
    â€œWhat, sir,” I inquired, “are we to do?”
    â€œWhy, Ti, I suppose that we must wait a day or two and see if your uncle comes back. If he does not, we will have to go after him and run him to ground. Else I fear greatly for his sake and, frankly, for the sake of Louisiana and the Republic.”
    In truth, my uncle had run off two or three times before, once to the neighboring village of Pond in the Sky, which he had mistaken for Dover, on the English Channel, to assist Lord Nelson against Napoleon; and again over the border into Canada, to escape the blandishments of a determined local widow-woman named Goody Kittredge, who had set her cap for him and his hemp income. In both instances he had been home by nightfall.
    Now, as evening came and my uncle did not, my father had us ratchet the head vise ever tighter, until his kindly gray eyes began to start out of their sockets; my mother continued to go to the window and look out into the blue twilight creeping over our mountain; and I began to feel dreadfully remiss that I had not kept better track of my ward. The night wore on, and eventually my mother coaxed my father, still wearing the vise, to bed. But by then I was more alarmed than I could ever recall being.
    The idea occurred to me sometime after midnight. I would, I resolved, run my uncle to ground myself, even if I had to follow him to the Pacific to do so. Before I could lose my nerve, I began to pack my watercolors, a cylindrical metal tube of blank canvases, my gun, and other possibles. Around two A.M., having stocked up with a good supply of my mother’s cartwheel cookies, I stole out of our farmhouse and made my way down to the village, where I spent another two hours at my father’s newspaper office, printing several dozen handbills that I believed would be useful in my search. Just as the sunrise struck the soaring peaks of the Green Mountains, turning them as pink as one of my mother’s sugar-glazed apples, I boarded the southbound mail.
    â€œGone to find uncle. Much love, Ticonderoga,” read the note I’d left on the kitchen table. Yet despite the confident tone of my message, I had the strongest feeling, as the stage jolted down the line toward Boston, that even if I were fortunate enough to locate Private True Teague Kinneson, persuading him to come home again might well prove impossible.

 
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BOSTON

6
RUNAWAY UNCLE. Run off from Kingdom Common, Vermont, an UNCLE, Private True Teague Kinneson, about 50 years of age. His stature is tall, his countenance fierce, his clothes and gear those of a knight-errant, consisting of chain mail, a belled night-stocking over a copper plate in his head, a red sash, and galoshes worn high or low as the occasion requires. A former soldier with the Continental Army, a playwright, and a classical scholar, this UNCLE imagines himself to

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