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Updated: June 25, 2025
"Nate," said Birt, at last, speaking with that subacute conviction, so strong yet so ill-defined, which vividly warns the ill-judged and yet cannot stop the tongue constrained by its own folly, "what d'ye s'pose I fund in the woods yestiddy?" The two small eyes, set close together, seemed merged in one, so concentrated was their gaze. Again their expression struck Birt's attention.
He was momently in terror of arrest, and he often pondered on Nate's uncharacteristic forbearance. Perhaps Nate was afraid that Birt's story, told from the beginning in court, might constrain belief and affect the validity of the entry. Birt vainly speculated, too, upon the strange disappearance of the grant. There it was in the pocket of the coat late that night, and the next morning early gone!
The two men exchanged a glance of vague comment upon his silence, and then they too looked idly down at the pit. Tennessee abruptly caught Birt's listless hand as it hung at his side, for Towse had suddenly entered the tanyard, and prancing up to her in joyous recognition, was trying to lick her face. "G'way, Towse," she drawled gutturally.
Not that he had discovered anything so extraordinary in his trap, for his trap was empty, but when he reached the mill, he found that the miller had killed a bear and captured a cub, and the orphan, chained to a post, had deeply absorbed George Birt's attention. To sophisticated people, the boy might have seemed as grotesque as the cub. George wore an unbleached cotton shirt.
"Look-a-hyar, Birt," said the tanner with a solemnity which the boy did not altogether understand, "gin Nate the grant." "I hain't got it," replied Birt, badgered and growing nervous. "Tell him, then, ye never teched it." Birt's impulse was to adopt the word. But he had seen enough of falsehood. He had done with concealment. "I did tech it," he said boldly, "but I hain't got it.
Somehow the episode of the afternoon had left so vivid an impression on Birt's mind that hours afterward he seemed to see the dull, clouded sky, the sombre, encircling woods, the brown stretch of spent tan, the little gray shed, and within it, hanging upon a peg, the butternut jeans coat, a stiff white paper protruding from its pocket. That grant, he thought, had taken from him his rights.
Birt, returned to Canada with the third party of young emigrants, numbering over a hundred. The following is an extract from Mrs. Birt's first letter after their arrival:
"Waal, Birt, we-uns hev been a-waitin' fur ye," said the tanner in a subdued, grave tone that somehow reminded Birt of the bated voices in a house of death. "Set down hyar on the wood-pile, fur Andy an' me hev got a word ter say ter ye." Birt's dilated black eyes turned in dumb appeal from one to the other as he sank down on the wood-pile.
As to the day off, he was glad to have that question settled by a quarrel between his employees, thus relieving him of responsibility. Birt's wrath was always evanescent, and he was sorry a moment afterward for what he had said. Andy Byers exchanged no more words with him, and skillfully combined a curt and crusty manner toward him with an aspect of contemplative dreariness.
It was, however, based on the only feasible principle which, as it seems to the writer, will not result in doubt and confusion. Now that photography has come to the assistance of the observer, Mr. Birt's proposal, if confined within narrower limits, would be far less arduous an undertaking than before, and might be easily carried out.
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