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Updated: June 22, 2025
He was bright and boyish-looking, with a frank tanned face, which made his curling flaxen hair seem almost white. "I worked like a darky hauling yesterday," he said reproachfully, "but when your turn comes, you climb a woodpile and pass the job along. When we go into battle I suppose Dandy and you will sit down to boil coffee, and hand your muskets to the servants."
But he went because he couldn't sit there any longer, because he was about to explode with rage and grief and fear and bitterness. He did not go toward the woodpile what difference did dry kindling make now? At the side of the house he stooped down and softly called Buck.
The pile of wood in the shed lowered fast, and the pile of money hoarded behind the loose brick in the chimney lowered with it the money faster than the wood, perhaps. There was a widow with three children, a mile down the shore. Her husband had been drowned the year before, and there was no brick loose in her chimney to look behind as the woodpile diminished.
"She stayed playing with Diana more than half an hour more'n I gave her leave to; and now she's perched out there on the woodpile talking to Matthew, nineteen to the dozen, when she knows perfectly well she ought to be at her work. And of course he's listening to her like a perfect ninny. I never saw such an infatuated man.
Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he had brought him the little axe, but his father said, "Feel, feel!" and he found his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in a zeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far he learned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfy yourself with anything, even hard work.
Maybe she isn't sure in her own mind, and wants me to see, independently, if there's any smell of something dead in the woodpile. Or, she may think that having a private detective called in may throw a scare into somebody. Or maybe she thinks somebody may be fixing up an accident for her, next, and she wants a pistol-totin' gent in the house for a while. Or any combination thereof.
He had contrived to whisper: "It was the Schooner Hesperus." And then, in a corner of the room, a little girl, for no properly explained reason, had burst out crying. She had yelled, she had bellowed, and would not be comforted; and in the ensuing confusion Ashe had escaped to the woodpile at the bottom of the garden, saved by a miracle.
Watson, in reproof, as she covered the bread with many wrappings and fixed two chairs to hold it behind the stove for the night; "you didn't even worry the night the crop froze, sleepin' and snorin' the whole night through, with me up every half hour watching the thermometer, and it slippin' lower and lower, and the pan o' water on the woodpile gettin' its little slivers of ice around the edge, and when the thermometer went to thirty, I knew it was all up with the wheat, but do you think I could wake you you rolled over with a grunt, leavin' me alone to think of the two hundred acres gone in the night, after all our hard work ... and then to have you come down in the mornin', stretchin' and yawnin', after a good night's sleep, and says you, as cheerful as could be, 'Cold mornin', Ma!"
If there be any part of the house, including certain dark corners of the attic, that is fearfully Mesopotamian after nightfall, it is that woodpile. Even when I sit above, secure with lights, if by chance I hear tappings from below such noises are common on a windy night I know that it is the African Magician pounding for the genie, the sound echoing through the hollow earth.
He knew that, if wood were needed, his mother would hunt for him, but with the big pile of firewood behind the shanty, she would not search for him. She would be glad that for a time she need not feed him! Gyp had been shrewd when he had made that woodpile!
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