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“We’ll come over here an’ learn ye how to enjoy yerself some day,” one of them said.

“I’m pretty well posted on that subject now,” Samson answered.

It is likely that they would have begun his schooling at once but when they came out into the store and saw the big Vermonter standing in the candlelight their laughter ceased for a moment. Bill was among them with a well-filled bottle in his hand.

He and the others got into a wagon which had been waiting at the door and drove away with a wild Indian whoop from the lips of one of the young men.

Samson sat down in the candlelight and Abe in a moment arrived.

“I’m getting awful sick o’ this business,” said Abe.

“I kind o’ guess you don’t like the whisky part of it,” Samson remarked, as he felt a piece of cloth.

“I hate it,” Abe went on. “It don’t seem respectable any longer.”

“Back in Vermont we don’t like the whisky business.”

“You’re right, it breeds deviltry and disorder. In my youth I was surrounded by whisky. Everybody drank it. A bottle or a jug of liquor was thought to be as legitimate a piece of merchandise as a pound of tea or a yard of calico. That’s the way I’ve always thought of it. But lately I’ve begun to get the Yankee notion about whisky. When it gets into bad company it can raise the devil.”

Soon after nine o’clock Abe drew a mattress filled with corn husks from under the counter, cleared away the bolts of cloth and laid it where they had been and covered it with a blanket.

“This is my bed,” said he. “I’ll be up at five in the morning. Then I’ll be making tea here by the fireplace to wash down some jerked meat and a hunk o’ bread. At six or a little after I’ll be ready to go with you again. Jack Kelso is going to look after the store to-morrow.”

He began to laugh.

“Ye know when I went out of the tavern that little vixen stood peekin’ into the window–Bim, Jack’s girl,” said Abe. “I asked her why she didn’t go in and she said she was scared. ‘Who you ‘fraid of?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I reckon that boy,’ says she. And honestly her hand trembled when she took hold of my arm and walked to her father’s house with me.”

Abe snickered as he spread another blanket. “What a cut-up she is! Say, we’ll have some fun watching them two I reckon,” he said.

The logs were ready two days after the cutting began. Martin Waddell and Samuel Hill sent teams to haul them. John Cameron and Peter Lukins had brought the window sash and some clapboards from Beardstown in a small flat boat. Then came the day of the raising–a clear, warm day early in September. All the men from the village and the near farms gathered to help make a home for the newcomers. Samson and Jack Kelso went out for a hunt after the cutting and brought in a fat buck and many grouse for the bee dinner, to which every woman of the neighborhood made a contribution of cake or pie or cookies or doughnuts.

“What will be my part?” Samson had inquired of Kelso.

“Nothing but a jug of whisky and a kind word and a house warming,” Kelso had answered.

They notched and bored the logs and made pins to bind them and cut those that were to go around the fireplace and window spaces. Strong, willing and well-trained hands hewed and fitted the logs together. Alexander Ferguson lined the fireplace with a curious mortar made of clay in which he mixed grass for a binder. This mortar he rolled into layers called “cats,” each eight inches long and three inches thick. Then he laid them against the logs and held them in place with a woven network of sticks. The first fire–a slow one–baked the clay into a rigid stonelike sheath inside the logs and presently the sticks were burned away. The women had cooked the meats by an open fire and spread the dinner on a table of rough boards resting on poles set in crotches. At noon one of them sounded a conch shell. Then with shouts of joy the men hurried to the fireside and for a moment there was a great spluttering over the wash basins. Before they ate every man except Abe and Samson “took a pull at the jug–long or short”–to quote a phrase of the time.