A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 15

The affair made an unusual stir, and all that Monday a considerable number of persons walked up to the clearing to see if they could determine the cause of the colts' mysterious death. Many and various were the conjectures. Some professed to believe that the colts had been wantonly poisoned. "It's a state-prison offense to lay poison for domestic animals," we overheard several of them say; but no one could find any motive for such a deed.

The owner of the Percheron brought a horse doctor, who made a careful examination, but he was unable to determine anything more than that the horses had died of a virulent poison. We buried them that afternoon.

Before night the news had reached Mrs. Kennard. In her grief she not only reproached herself bitterly for allowing Sylph to be turned out in so wild a place but held the old Squire and all of us as somehow to blame for her pet's death. The owner of the Percherons also intimated that he should hold us liable for his loss, although when a man turns his stock out in a neighbor's pasture it is generally on the understanding that it is at his own risk. He took away his other Percheron colt; and during the day all the other persons who had colts up there took their animals home. In all respects the occurrence was most disagreeable--a truly black Monday with us. The old Squire said little, except that he wanted the right thing done.

For an hour or more after we went to bed that night Addison and I lay talking about the affair, but we could think of no explanation of the strange occurrence and at last fell asleep. The next morning, however, the solution of the mystery flashed into Addison's mind. As we were dressing at five o'clock, he suddenly turned to me and exclaimed in a queer voice:

"I know what killed those colts!"

"What?" I asked.

"That fox bed!"

For a whole minute we stood there, half dressed, looking at each other in consternation. Without doubt, the blame for the loss of the colts was on us. What the consequences might be we hardly dared to think.

"What shall we do?" I exclaimed.

Addison looked alarmed as he answered in a low tone, "Keep quiet--till we think it over."

"We must tell the old Squire," I said.

"But there's Willis," Addison reminded me. "It was Willis who made the bed, you know."

The old clearing was, as I have said, a great place for foxes; and the preceding fall Addison and I, wis.h.i.+ng to add to the fund we were acc.u.mulating for our expenses when we should go away to college, had entered into a kind of partners.h.i.+p with Willis Murch to do a little trapping up there. Addison and I were little more than silent partners, however; Willis actually tended the traps.

But there are years, as every trapper knows, when you cannot get a fox into a steel trap by any amount of artfulness. What the reason is, I do not know, unless some fox that has been trapped and that has escaped pa.s.ses the word round among all the other foxes. There were plenty of foxes coming to the clearing; we never went up there without seeing fresh signs about the old barn. Yet Willis got no fox.

What is more strange, it was so all over New England that fall; foxes kept clear of steel traps. As the fur market was quick, certain city dealers began sending out offers of "fox pills" to trappers whom they had on their lists. Willis received one of those letters and showed it to us. The fox pills were, of course, poison and were to be inclosed in little b.a.l.l.s of tallow and laid where foxes were known to come.

Trappers were advised to use them but were properly cautioned how and where to expose them. After picking up one of the pills, a fox would make for the nearest running water as fast as he could go; and that was the place for the trapper to look for him, for, after drinking, the fox soon expired. It has been argued that poison is more humane than the steel trap, since it brings a quick death; but both are cruel. There are also other considerations that weigh against the use of poison; but at that time there was no law against it.

The furrier who wrote to Willis offered to send him a box of those pills for seventy-five cents. We talked it over and agreed to try it, and Addison and I contributed the money.

A few days later Willis received the pills and proceeded to lay them out after a plan of his own. He cut several tallow candles into pieces about an inch long, and embedded a pill in each. When he had prepared twenty or more of those pieces of poisoned tallow, he put them in what he called a fox bed, of oat chaff, behind that old barn. The bed was about as large as the floor of a small room. At that time of year farmers were killing poultry, and Willis collected a basketful of chickens' and turkeys' heads to put into the bed along with the pieces of tallow. He thought that the foxes would smell the heads and dig the bed over.

We had said nothing to any one about it. The old Squire was away from home; but we knew pretty well that he would not approve of that method of getting foxes. Indeed, he had little sympathy with the use of traps.

Willis was the only one who looked after the bed, or, indeed, who went up to the clearing at all.

During the next three or four weeks Willis gathered in not less than ten pelts, I think. They were mostly red foxes, but one was a large "crossed gray," the skin of which brought twenty-two dollars. After every few days Willis "doctored" the bed with more pills; he probably used more than a hundred.

What had happened to the colts was now clear. They had nuzzled that chaff for the oat grains that were left in it and had picked up some of those little b.a.l.l.s of tallow. We wondered now that we had not at once guessed the cause of their death, and we wondered, too, that we had not thought of the fox bed and the danger from it when we first turned the colts into the pasture. The fact remains, however, that it had never occurred to us that fox pills would poison colts as well as foxes.

All that day as we worked we brooded over it; and that evening, when we had done the ch.o.r.es, we stole off to the Murches' and, calling Willis out, told him about it and asked him what he thought we had better do.

At first he was incredulous, then thoroughly alarmed. It was not so much the thought of having to settle for the loss of the horses that terrified him as it was the dread that he might be imprisoned for exposing poison to domestic animals.

"Don't say a word!" he exclaimed. "n.o.body knows about that fox bed. If we keep still, it will never come out."

Addison and I both felt that such secrecy would leave us with a mighty mean feeling in our hearts; but Willis begged us never to say a word about it to any one. He was as penitent as we were, I think; but the thought that he might have to go to jail filled him with panic.

We went home in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, without having reached any decision.

"We've got to square this somehow," Addison said. "If I had the money, I'd settle for the colts and say nothing more to Willis about it."

"Money wouldn't make Mrs. Kennard feel much better," I said.

"That's so; but we might find a pretty sorrel colt somewhere, and make her a present of it in place, of Sylph--if we only had the money."

If it had not been for Willis, I rather think that we should have gone to the old Squire that very evening and told him the whole story; but the legal consequences of the affair troubled us, and since they affected Willis more than they affected us we did not like to say anything.

Week after week went by without our being able to bring ourselves to confess. The concealment was a source of daily uneasiness to us; although we rarely spoke of the affair to each other, it was always on our minds. Whenever we did speak of it together, Addison would say, "We've got to straighten that out," or, "I hate to have that colt sc.r.a.pe hanging on us in this way." We tried several times to get Willis's consent to our telling the old Squire; but he had brooded over the thing so long that he had convinced himself that if his act became known he would surely be sent to the penitentiary.

So there the matter lay covered up all summer until one afternoon in September, when the old Squire drove to the village to contract for his apple barrels, and I went with him to get a pair of boots. Just as we were starting for home we met Mrs. Kennard. Previously she had often visited us at the farm, but since the death of Sylph she had not come near us. The old Squire tried to-day to be more cordial than ever, but Mrs. Kennard answered him rather coldly. She started on, but turned suddenly and asked whether we had learned anything more about the death of those colts.

"And, oh, do you think that poor Sylph lay there, suffering, a long time?" she exclaimed, with tears in her eyes. "I keep thinking of it."

"No, we have learned nothing more," the old Squire said gently. "It was a mysterious affair; but I think all three of the colts died suddenly, within a few minutes."

That was all he could say to comfort her, and Mrs. Kennard walked slowly away with her handkerchief at her eyes. It was painful, and I sat there in the wagon feeling like a mean little malefactor.

"Very singular about those colts," the old Squire remarked partly to me, partly to himself, as we drove on. "A strange thing."

Sudden resolution nerved me. I was sick of skulking. "Sir," said I, swallowing hard several times, "I know what killed those colts!"

The old Squire glanced quickly at me, started to speak, but, seeing how greatly agitated I was, kindly refrained from questioning me.

"It was fox pills!" I blurted out. "Willis Murch and Ad and I had a fox bed up there last winter. We never thought of it when the colts were put in. They ate the poison pills."

The old Squire made no comment, and I plunged into further details.

"That accounts for it, then," he said at last.

I had expected him to speak plainly to me about those fox pills, but he merely asked me what I thought of using poison in trapping.

"I never would use it again!" I exclaimed hotly. "I've had enough of it!"

"I am glad you see it so," he remarked. "It is a bad method. You never know what may come of it. Hounds or deer may get it, or sheep, or young cattle, or even children."

We drove on in silence for some minutes. Clearly the old Squire was having me do my own thinking; for he now asked me what I thought should be done next.

"Ad thinks we ought to square it up somehow," I replied.

The old Squire nodded. "I am glad to hear that," he said. "What does Addison think we ought to do?"

"Pay Mr. Cutter for that Percheron colt."

"Yes, and Mrs. Kennard?"

"He thinks we could find another sorrel colt somewhere and make her a present of it."