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Royal was as short with his pen as he was dash-away with his tongue. The letter was a brief but pressing invitation to Cyrus and the Farrars to visit their camping acquaintances of the Maine wilds at the Sinclairs' home in Philadelphia before the English boys recrossed the Atlantic. "Come you must!" wrote Roy.
Five minutes afterwards the Americans found themselves seated at a table garlanded with red-berried holly, trailing ivy, and pearl-eyed mistletoe, and surrounded by a round dozen of Farrars, including several youngsters whose general place was in schoolroom or nursery, but who, even to a tot of three, were promoted to dine in splendor on Christmas Day.
But while the young Farrars rubbed their sleep-dimmed eyes, and slowly realized that the woodsman whom they had been expecting had at last arrived, a strangely brilliant illumination lit up the log walls. This sudden and bewildering light showed them the figure of a hunter in mud-spattered gray trousers, with coarse woollen stockings of lighter hue drawn over them above his buckskin moccasins.
Scandalous exposure and that forged letter business oh, that was the mother prosecution hushed up somehow. Ought to be serving her fourteen years and that business of poor Farrars, the banker got hold of some of his secrets and blackmailed him till he blew his brains out " It was so exciting that I clean forgot the bishop, till a low gasp at my elbow startled me.
"That moose was shot through the right fore-leg," he whispered, as the trackers reached the edge of the forest. "How do you know?" gasped the Farrars. The woodsman answered by kneeling, bending his face close to the ground, and drawing his brown finger successively round three prints on a soft patch of earth, which the unpractised eyes could scarcely discern.
"Tell you what it is!" he said suddenly, turning upon the Farrars, "I never guided Britishers till now; but, wherever you sprung from, you're clean grit. If a man is that, it don't matter a whistle to me what country riz him." A few minutes afterwards, with a jingle, jangle, lurch, and rattle, the stage-coach was swaying its way out of Greenville.
Cyrus and the Farrars, while they looked upon him, felt that, even if they had never heard Herb's exclamation, they would have had no difficulty in identifying the creature, remembering that story which had thrilled them by the camp-fire at Millinokett. It was Herb Heal's traitor chum the half-breed, Cross-eyed Chris.
In his character of naturalist he had managed to find out more about the coon's various dodges than even the old guide had done. In breathless wonder the Farrars presently beheld that ingenious raccoon steal along to the end of the most projecting limb on a different side of the tree from the one it had climbed, so that a screen of boughs and the trunk were between it and its adversary.
That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave; the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon his knees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years of anger into every blow of his arms.
In his story, 'Loss and Gain, he makes one of his characters, who has just become a Catholic, thus refer to the stock Anglican Divines, a class of writers who are, at all events, immensely superior to the Ellicotts and Farrars of these latter days: 'I am embracing that creed which upholds the divinity of tradition with Laud, consent of Fathers with Beveridge, a visible Church with Bramhall, dogma with Bull, the authority of the Pope with Thorndyke, penance with Taylor, prayers for the dead with Ussher, celibacy, asceticism, ecclesiastical discipline with Bingham. What is this to say but that, according to the Cardinal, our great English divines have divided the Roman dress-suit amongst themselves?
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