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It took him some time to make his way out into the main road, but he did it at last, straightening his wet hair under the old cap. "It's so like a dog to die that way! I'll try, just once, how the world looks when I face it." He sat down outside of a blacksmith's forge, the only building in sight, on the pump-trough, and looked wearily about. His head fell now and then on his breast from weakness.
It is like climbing the uneven stairs of some vast and roofless ancient palace, upon each floor of which dwell families who have come in and roofed over the suites of rooms and made houses out of them. The stairs lead you, not from floor to floor, but from bakery to carpenter-shop, from the blacksmith's to the telegraph-office.
He is no ardent protector of game, and, if a clutch of eggs disappears from the pheasant's nest he has chanced to discover in the woods, thinks little about the incident, and concludes that Ned the blacksmith's broody hen has probably been requisitioned as a foster-mother, and that some day he will know more of the true state of affairs when he visits the smithy at the cross-roads.
The service was held in the blacksmith's shop, the largest building available. The minister was a big, dark man with a massive head and a great, rolling voice which he used with tremendous effect in all the parts of his service. The psalm he sang mostly alone, which appeared to trouble him not at all.
From this he had paid his store bill, and the blacksmith's bill, which when deducted, left him eight hundred and fourteen dollars she did not bother with the cents. The deductions were easily verified both the storekeeper and the blacksmith were married men!
She was sorry that she had allowed so trifling a matter to mar the serenity of the family; her conscience upbraided her that she had not besought him to avoid the blacksmith's shop, where certain men of the neighborhood were wont to congregate and drink deep into the night.
I said. "Well, maybe he did. We had the job all right. But we'll make short work of him now." He certainly went at it in a way that alarmed me and would have electrified Jones. While I held the chain Emett muzzled the lion with a stick and a strand of lasso. His big blacksmith's hands held, twisted and tied with remorseless strength. "Now for the hardest part of it," said he, "packing him up."
A road ran directly onward from the southern wood, and a road ran just as directly outward to the black woodland on the north. This broad and snowy road, cut by deep wheel ruts, trampled by many heavy footprints, was really all one road, but the blacksmith's shop, which stood midway between the two woodlands, and between the two parts of the road, seemed to cut it into two separate parts.
Happily, in consequence of the number of canals and ditches, the horsemen were compelled to keep in the causeway, and were thus unable to cut off the fugitives by making a circuit in any other direction. We could not help answering to the brave blacksmith's call, by joining those who rallied round him.
A blacksmith's shed had been added in the course of time, and a brick coke oven. He stopped at the Forge shed, filled with ruddy light and shadow, the ringing of hammers, and silently watched the malleable metal on the anvil. Flakes of glowing iron fell, changing from ruby to blue and black. The Penny iron!
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