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Under his coonskin cap his head was tied up in a red cotton handkerchief, and as he stood leaning against the red-clay wall of the rampart, talking gravely to another settler, the children swarmed up the steep interior slope of the fortifications behind him and from this coign of vantage busied themselves, without let or hindrance, in pulling off his cap, untying the handkerchief, and with shrill cries of excitement and interest exposing to view the bare poll.
To each of them the Major gave a little package, which each darky took with shining teeth and a laugh of delight all looking with wonder at the curious little stranger with his rifle and coonskin cap, until a scowl from the Major checked the smile that started on each black face.
An early supper was had, and something was kept hot for those who were missing, for it was felt they would come in chilled to the bone and with tremendous appetites. Dave was beginning to grow sleepy when he heard a movement outside, and a moment later Sam Barringford came into view, with downcast face and with the water dripping from his coonskin cap and hunting shirt.
Late suppers, dyspepsy, gas companies, thieves, ward politicians, pretty waiter-girls, and other metropolitan refinements, were unknown among them. No savage in good standing would take postage-stamps. You couldn't have bo't a coonskin with a barrel of 'em.
A few soldiers of the post coming in laden with game wore the buckskin leggings, shirt, and coonskin cap usual among the settlers, for it had been bitterly demonstrated that the thorns of the trackless wilderness had no sort of reverence for the texture of the king's red coat. Even the cat realized the transition to the demesne of civilization and in some sort the wonted domestic atmosphere.
For, as they scattered to each side of the cleft, the steel tube no longer kept turning towards them, while the coonskin cap remained equally without motion. At length, becoming convinced, and urged on by the Red Cross chief and the bearded savage by his side, they dashed boldly up, and, dismounting, entered the chine over the body of the butchered horse.
May came, and the pools dried up, the orchards were pink and white, the birches and the maples were all yellow-green on the mountain sides against the dark pines, and Cynthia was driving the minister's gig to Brampton. Ahead of her, in the canon made by the road between the great woods, strode an uncouth but powerful figure coonskin cap, homespun breeches tucked into boots, and all.
Isaac Worthington came to Coniston not once, but many times, before the snow fell; and afterward, too, in Silas Wheelock's yellow sleigh through the great drifts under the pines, the chestnut Morgan trotting to one side in the tracks. On one of these excursions he fell in with that singular character of a bumpkin who had interested him on his first visit, in coonskin cap and overcoat and mittens.
The wood-cutter leaned on his ax to listen; the plowman waved his coonskin cap, his wife, a red handkerchief from the doorway of their log cabin. "Oh, tell me where the Buckeye cabin was made? 'Twas built among the boys who wield the plow and spade, Where the log-cabin stands in the bonnie Buckeye shade."
For Jethro Bass, still with the coonskin cap, but in a brass-buttoned coat secretly purchased in Brampton, appeared at meeting! It made no difference that he entered quietly, and sat in the rear slip, orthodox Coniston knew that he was behind them: good Mr. Ware knew it, and changed a little his prayers and sermon: Cynthia knew it, grew hot and cold by turns under her poke bonnet.
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