turkeys a million miles away as easy as rolling off a log, and deer,
and catamounts, and squirrels, and herons, and everything. So his
father must have killed heaps of Indians and red-coats and renegades.

He put this daily question to his mother: "How many do you s'pose
Pa has killed by this time, Ma?"

And then, in the fall, his mother went away and left him. They did
not tell him she had gone to the war. He would not have believed
them if they had, for she was too sick to go. She had been in bed
for a long, long time; the doctor came to see her every day, and
finally the preacher. He hated both of them, especially the latter,
who prayed so loudly and so vehemently that his mother must have
been terribly disturbed. Why should every one caution him to be
quiet and not make a noise because it disturbed mother, and yet say
nothing when that old preacher went right into her room and yelled
same as he always did in church? He was very bitter about it,
and longed for his father to come home with his rifle and shoot
everybody, including his grandfather who had "switched" him severely
and unjustly because he threw stones at Parson Hook's saddle horse
while the good man was offering up petitions from the sick room.

He went to the "burying," and was more impressed by the fact that
nearly all of the men who rode or drove to the graveyard down in
the "hollow" carried rifles and pistols than he was by the strange
solemnity of the occasion, for, while he realized in a vague,
mistrustful way that his mother was to be put under the ground,
his trust clung resolutely to God's promise, accepted in its most
literal sense, that the dead shall rise again and that "ye shall
be born again." That was what the preacher said,--and he had cried