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Raften had thrashed more than one neighbour for beating a horse, and once, on interfering, was himself thrashed, for he had the ill-luck to happen on a prizefighter. But that had no lasting effect on him. He continued to champion the dumb brute in his own brutal way. Among the neighbours the perquisites of the boys were the calfskins.
You go an' tend to your work." So instead of hiking back gloriously laden with Calfskins, Guy was sent to ignominious and un-Injun toil in the garden. Soon he heard his mother: "Guysie, Guysie." He dropped his hoe and walked to the kitchen. "Where you goin'?" roared his father from afar. "Go back and mind your work." "Maw wants me. She called me." "You mind your work.
He got out hides because it had to be done goatskins and calfskins steeped them in the river, laid them in bark, and tanned them after a fashion ready for shoes. In the winter at the very first threshing he set aside his seed corn for the next spring, in order to have it done; best to have things done and done with; he was a methodical man.
Then the priest got out, and off he set home to his parsonage both fast and light, for he no longer had his watches and money to weigh him down. As for Little Peter, he went home again, and said to Big Peter, 'There was a good sale to-day for calfskins at the market. 'Why, what did you get for your tattered one, now? asked Big Peter. 'Quite as much as it was worth.
At first this was done loosely, but tightened up when once around, and finally both the drum-heads were drawn tense. To the surprise of all, Guy promptly took possession of the finished drum. "Them's my Calfskins," which, of course, was true. And Caleb said, with a twinkle in his eye, "The wood seems to go with the skins."
Their fur coats form a study in colour patchwork coats from calfskins which combine every shade from white to rusty red; goatskins, from long straight black to white; curly bearskins from black to brown and brown to polar white; wealthy peasant women, with beautiful red fox furs hiding neck and face, their eyes glistening through the apertures which served the same purpose for the first and original tenant.
As soon as he was gone, his foolish, doting mother, already crushed with the burden of the house, left everything and hoed two or three extra rows of cabbages, so "Paw" should find a great showing of work when he came back. The Calfskins were hard as tin and, of course, had the hair on.
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