fell as if he were breathing hard, but he only nodded assent and said nothing.
“Now,” continued Mr. Came, “have you made out to keep the rope from under her feet?”
“She ain’t got t-t-tangled up one s-single time,” said Elisha, stuttering in his excitement, but looking up with some courage from his bare toes, with which he was assiduously threading the grass.
“So far, so good. Now bout bein’ afraid. As you seem so certain of gettin’ the cow, I suppose you hain’t been a speck scared, hev you? Honor bright, now!”
“I—I—not but just a little mite. I”—
“Hold up a minute. Of course you didn’t SAY you was afraid, and didn’t SHOW you was afraid, and nobody knew you WAS afraid, but that ain’t the way we fixed it up. You was to call the cow your’n if you could drive her to the pasture for a month without BEIN’ afraid. Own up square now, hev you be’n afraid?”
A long pause, then a faint, “Yes.”
“Where’s your manners?”
“I mean yes, sir.”
“How often? If it hain’t be’n too many times mebbe I’ll let ye off, though you’re a reg’lar girl-boy, and’ll be runnin’ away from the cat bimeby. Has it be’n—twice?”
“Yes,” and the Little Prophet’s voice was very faint now, and had a decided tear in it.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has it be’n four times?”
“Y-es, sir.” More heaving of the gingham shirt.
“Well, you AIR a thunderin’ coward! How many times? Speak up now.”
More digging of the bare toes in the earth, and one premonitory tear drop stealing from under the downcast lids, then,—
“A little, most every day, and you can keep the cow,” wailed the Prophet, as he turned abruptly and fled behind the shed, where he flung himself into the green depths of a tansy bed, and gave himself up to unmanly sobs.
Cassius Came gave a sort of shamefaced guffaw at the abrupt departure of the boy, and went on into the house, while Rebecca and Thirza made a stealthy circuit of the barn and a polite and circumspect entrance through the parsonage front gate.
Rebecca told the minister’s wife what she could remember of the interview between Cassius Came and Elisha Simpson, and tender-hearted Mrs. Baxter longed to seek and comfort her Little Prophet sobbing in the tansy bed, the brand of coward on his forehead, and what was much worse, the fear in his heart that he deserved it.
Rebecca could hardly be prevented from bearding Mr. Came and openly espousing the cause of Elisha, for she was an impetuous, reckless, valiant creature when a weaker vessel was attacked or threatened unjustly.
Mrs. Baxter acknowledged that Mr. Came had been true, in a way, to his word and bargain, but she confessed that she had never heard of so cruel and hard a bargain since the days of Shylock, and it was all the worse for being made with a child.
Rebecca hurried home, her visit quite spoiled and her errand quite forgotten till she reached the brick house door, where she told her aunts, with her customary picturesqueness of speech, that she would rather eat buttermilk bread till she died than partake of food mixed with one of Mr. Came’s yeast-cakes; that it would choke her, even in the shape of good raised bread.
“That’s all very fine, Rebecky,” said her Aunt Miranda, who had a pin-prick for almost every bubble; “but don’t forget there’s two other mouths to feed in this house, and you might at least give your aunt and me the privilege of chokin’ if we feel to want to!”
IV
Mrs. Baxter finally heard from Mrs. Came, through whom all information was sure to filter if you gave it time, that her husband despised a coward, that he considered Elisha a regular mother’s-apron-string boy, and that he was “learnin’” him to be brave.
Bill Peters, the hired man, now drove Buttercup to pasture, though whenever Mr. Came went to Moderation or Bonnie Eagle, as he often did, Mrs. Baxter noticed that Elisha took the hired man’s place. She often joined him on these anxious expeditions, and, a like terror in both their souls, they attempted to train the red cow and give her some idea of obedience.
“If she only wouldn’t look at us that way we would get along real nicely with her, wouldn’t we?” prattled the Prophet, straggling along by her side; “and she is a splendid cow; she gives twenty-one quarts a day, and Mr. Came says it’s more’n half cream.”
The minister’s wife assented to all this, thinking that if Buttercup would give up her habit of turning completely round in the road to roll her eyes and elevate her white-tipped eyebrow, she might indeed be an enjoyable companion; but in her present state of development her society was not agreeable, even did she give sixty-one quarts of milk a day. Furthermore, when Mrs. Baxter discovered that she never did any of these reprehensible things with Bill Peters, she began to believe cows more intelligent creatures than she had supposed them to be, and she was indignant to think Buttercup could count so confidently on the weakness of a small boy and a timid woman.
One evening, when Buttercup was more than usually exasperating, Mrs. Baxter said to the Prophet, who was bracing himself to keep from being pulled into a wayside brook where Buttercup loved to dabble, “Elisha, do you know anything about the superiority of mind over matter?”
No, he didn’t, though it was not a fair time to ask the question, for he had sat down in the road to get a better purchase on the rope.
“Well, it doesn’t signify. What I mean is that we can die but once, and it is a glorious thing to die for a great principle. Give me that rope. I can pull like an ox in my present frame of mind. You run down on the opposite side of the brook, take that big stick wade right in—you are barefooted,—brandish the stick, and, if necessary, do more than brandish. I would go myself, but it is better she should recognize you as her master, and I am in as much danger as you are, anyway. She may try to hook you, of course, but you must keep waving the stick,—die brandishing, Prophet, that’s the idea! She may turn and run for me, in which case I shall run too; but I shall die running, and the minister can bury us under our favorite sweet-apple tree!”
The Prophet’s soul was fired by the lovely lady’s eloquence. Their spirits mounted simultaneously, and they were flushed with a splendid courage in which death looked a mean and paltry thing compared with vanquishing that cow. She had already stepped into the pool, but the Prophet waded in towards her, moving the alder branch menacingly. She looked up with the familiar roll of the eye that had done her such good service all summer, but she quailed beneath the stern justice and the new valor of the Prophet’s gaze.
In that moment perhaps she felt ashamed of the misery she had caused the helpless mite. At any rate, actuated by fear, surprise, or remorse, she turned and walked back into the road without a sign of passion or indignation, leaving the boy and the lady rather disappointed at their easy victory. To be prepared for a violent death and receive not even a scratch made them fear that they
