The Wolf's Long Howl - Stanley Waterloo (book series for 10 year olds TXT) 📗

come back to town next year and pick up the threads. My nerves, which seemed a little out of the way, are better than they were when I came here. There's nothing to equal country air. I must have that whirl in my district yet. I don't think the boys have quite forgotten me. Have you noticed the drift at all? I could only judge from the papers. How are things in the Ninth Ward?"


THE HAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT HIM

I have read hundreds of queer histories. I have myself had various adventures, but I know of no experience more odd than that of an old schoolmate of mine named John Appleman. John was born in Macomb County, southeastern Michigan, in the year 1830. His father owned a farm of one hundred acres there. John's mother died when he was but a lad, and after that he lived alone with his father upon the farm. In 1855 John's father died. In 1856 John married a pretty girl of the neighborhood. A year later a child was born to them, a daughter. This is the brief history of John Appleman up to the time when he began to develop his real personality.

He was a contented personage in his early married life. His wife, while not a shrew, had undoubted force of character, but there was not much attrition; and his little daughter was, in John's estimation, the fairest child upon the continent. Personally, he was content with all the world, though his wife was somewhat less so. John had his failings. He was not counted among the farmers of the neighborhood as a "pushing" man. There was still much woodland in Macomb County in the year 1857, and in autumn the woods were most enticing. Squirrels, black and gray, were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter. John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some slight respect. He was so close to nature in his thoughts and fancies that he knew many things which they did not, and which had a money value. It was he, for instance, who first recognized the superior quality of the White Neshannock, the potato of the time. It was he who grafted the Baldwin upon his apple-trees, recognizing the fact that this particular apple was a toothsome and marketable and relatively non-decaying fruit. And it was he who could judge best as to what crosses and combinations would most improve the breed of horses and cattle and hogs and sheep. They admitted his "faculty," as they called it, in certain directions, but they had a profound contempt for him in others. They could not understand why he would leave standing in the midst of a wheat-field a magnificent soft maple, the branches of which shaded and made untillable an area of scores of yards. They could not understand why he hesitated to murder a tree. So it came that he was with them while scarcely of them, and that Mrs. Appleman, who could not comprehend, belonged to the majority.

It must not be understood that John Appleman was unpopular. On the contrary, each sturdy farmer rather liked while he criticised him. Had John run for township clerk, or possibly even for supervisor, that most important of township honors throughout Michigan, he might have been elected, but John did not know his strength. He recognized his own weakness, after a fashion. He knew that he would work violently for a month or two at a time, giving the vigorous hired man a decent test in holding his physical own, and he knew that after that he would become what the people called "slack," and a little listless; and it was in his slack times that the squirrel and grouse most suffered. Between him and the wife of his bosom had grown nothing, so grave as to be described as an armed neutrality; but more and more he hesitated in entering the house after an evening's work, and more and more he drifted down to the Corners--that is, the cross-roads where were the postoffice and the blacksmith-shop and the general store. He liked to be with the other fellows. He liked human companionship; and since his fellows drank, he began to drink with them. It is needless to explain how the habit grew upon him. The man who drinks whisky affects his stomach, and the stomach affects the nerves, and there is a sort of arithmetical progression until the stimulant eventually seems to become almost a part of life; and the man, unless he be one of great force of character, or one most knowing and scientific, must yield eventually to the stress of close conditions. Time came when John Appleman yielded, and carried whisky home in a gallon jug and hid it in the haymow.

Need does not exist for any going into details, for telling of what happened at the cross-roads store, of what good stories were related day by day and week by week and month by month, while the cup went round; it is sufficient to say that the stomach of John Appleman became querulous when he had not taken a stimulant within a limited number of hours, and that he was in a fair way of becoming an ordinary drunkard. With his experience and decadence came, necessarily, an expertness of judgment as to the quality of that which he drank. He could tell good liquor from bad, the young from the old.

It came that, being thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in general. He would not be seen a weakly vagrant, buying his jugful at the corner store; neither would he drink raw liquor. He would buy it in quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived from greater age, until in time each daily tipple would be an absorption of something so smooth and potent that immediate subsequent existence would be a thing desirable in all ways. And John Appleman had a plan.

The Appleman barn and house stood perhaps three hundred yards apart, near the crest of what was hardly worthy the name of hill, which sloped downward into what they called the "flats," through which the creek ran. The barn stood very close to uncleared woodland, and the banks ending the woodland showed a decidedly rocky exterior. Appleman, chasing a woodchuck one day, had seen him scurry into a hole in this rocky surface, and prying away with a handspike had unloosed a small mass of rock and discovered a cave; not much of a cave, it is true, but one of at least twenty feet in length and eight or ten in breadth, and full six feet in height. This discovery occurred a year or two before John felt the grip of any stimulant. He had forgotten all about it until there came to him the idea of drinking better whisky than did other people.

John had sold a yoke of oxen and a Blackhawk colt, and two hundred dollars in gold were resting heavily in his little cherry-wood desk in the farm-house sitting-room. One day he took ten of these gold-pieces and went to town; not to the cross-roads, but to the larger place, some ten miles distant, where was a distillery, and there he bought two barrels of whisky. Whisky in those days, before the time of present taxes, was sold from the distillery at prices ranging from thirty-five to fifty cents a gallon, about forty-seven gallons to a barrel. The team of horses dragged wearily home the heavy load; but they did not stop when home was reached, either in front of the house or at the barn-yard gate. Instead, they were turned aside through a rude gate leading into the flats, and thence drew the load to the mouth of the little cave, where, unseen by any one, Appleman tilted the barrels out and left them lying on the sward.

Other things had been bought in town that day, and Appleman had no difficulty in giving reasons for the lateness of his home-coming. Next day, though, he was a busy man. By the exercise of main strength, and the leverage afforded with a strong ironwood handspike, he succeeded in rolling both those barrels into the cave and uptilting them, and leaving them standing high and dry. The cave was as dry as a bone. He noted with satisfaction the overhanging clay bank above, and felt that if he were to be called away his treasure would be safe, since the opening would doubtless soon be hidden from the sight of anybody. When he went to bed that night he thought much of the hidden barrels.

An incident has been neglected in this account. When John Appleman bought those barrels, the son of the distiller, a boy of ten, was told to see that two designated barrels were rolled out from the storeroom. The boy marked them, utilizing the great chunk of red chalk which every country boy carried in his pocket some forty years ago. Furthermore, being a boy and having time to waste, he decorated the barrels with various grotesque figures, the ungainly fruit of his imagination. This boy's work with that piece of red chalk had an effect upon the future of John Appleman.

So things drifted, the whisky in the cave getting a little older, the friction between John Appleman and his more business-like wife getting somewhat more vigorous and emitting more domestic sparks, until there came a change to every one. The farmer, who had read of martial music, heard with his own ears the roll of the drum and the shrieking, encouraging call of the fife. War was on, and good men abandoned homes and families and surroundings because of what we call patriotism and principle. As for John Appleman, he was among the very first to enlist. He went into the army blithely. It is to be feared that John Appleman, like many a worthier man, preferred the various conditions appertaining to the tented field and the field of battle to that narrower scene of conflict called the home. Before leaving, however, he crept into the cave and varnished those two barrels with exceeding thoroughness.

"That will rather modify the process of evaporation. There will be good whisky there when I come home next year," he said.

John Appleman went to the war with a Michigan regiment, and it is but justice to him to say that he made an amazingly good soldier. He was made corporal and sergeant, and later second lieutenant, and filled that position gallantly until the war ended. That was his record in the great struggle. Meanwhile his home relations had somewhat changed.

Rather happier in the army than on the farm, John Appleman had felt a sense of half-gratitude that there had been no objection to his departure, and for months after he left Michigan he sent most of his soldier's pay home to his wife. Then came promotion and little attendant expenses, and he sent less. There came no letter, and after a while he sent nothing at all. "They have a good farm there which should support them," so he said to himself; "as for me, I am a poor fellow battling along down here, and what little I