The blueberry bushes were stripped bare of green. The stunted pines and sombre hemlocks looked in tone with the landscape now; where all was dreary they did not seem amiss.
"Je-whilikins!" exclaimed the sheriff as he drew up his coat collar.
"A madhouse is the place for the man who wants to live ou'doors in the winter time; the poor-farm is too good for him."
But Tom was used to privation, and even to suffering.
"Ou'doors" was the only home he knew, and with all its rigors he loved it.
He looked over the barren plains, knowing, in a dull sort of way, that they would shortly be covered with snow; but he had three coats, two of them with sleeves, and the crunch-crunch of the snow under his tread was music to his ears. Then, too, there were a few hospitable firesides where he could always warm himself; and the winter would soon be over, the birds would come again,-- new birds, singing the old songs,--the sap would mount in the trees, the buds swell on the blueberry bushes, and the young ivory leaves push their ruddy tips through the softening ground.
The plains were fatherland and mother-country, home and kindred, to Tom.
He loved the earth that nourished him, and he saw through all the seeming death in nature the eternal miracle of the resurrection.
To him winter was never cruel. He looked underneath her white mantle, saw the infant spring hidden in her warm bosom, and was content to wait.
Content to wait? Content to starve, content to freeze, if only he need not be carried into captivity.
The poor-farm was not a bad place, either, if only Tom had been a reasonable being. To be sure, when Hannah Sophia Palmer asked old Mrs. Pinkham how she liked it, she answered, with a patient sigh, that "her 'n' Mr. Pinkham hed lived there goin' on nine year, workin' their fingers to the bone 'most, 'n' yet they hadn't been able to lay up a cent!"
If this peculiarity of administration was its worst feature, it was certainly one that would have had no terrors for Tom o' the blueb'ry plains. Terrors of some sort, nevertheless, the poor-farm had for him; and when the sheriff's party turned in by the clump of white birches and approached the cabin, they found that fear had made the simple wise.
Tom had provished the little upper chamber, and, in place of the piece of sacking that usually served him for a door in winter, he had woven a defense of willow. In fine, he had taken all his basket stuff, and, treating the opening through which he entered and left his home precisely as if it were a bottomless chair, he had filled it in solidly, weaving to and fro, by night as well as by day, till he felt, poor fool, as safely intrenched as if he were in the heart of a fortress.
The sheriff tied his horse to a tree, and Rube Hobson and Pitt Packard got out of the double wagon. Two men laughed when they saw the pathetic defense, but the other shut his lips together and caught his breath.
(He had been born on a poor-farm, but no one knew it at Pleasant River.)
They called Tom's name repeatedly, but no other sound broke the silence of the plains save the rustling of the wind among the dead leaves.
"Numb-head!" muttered the sheriff, pounding on the side of the cabin with his whip-stock. "Come out and show yourself!
We know you're in there, and it's no use hiding!"
At last in response to a deafening blow from Rube Hobson's hard fist, there came the answering note of a weak despairing voice.
"Tom ain't ter hum," it said; "Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle."
"That's all right!" guffawed the men; "but you've got to go some more, and go a diff'rent way. It ain't no use fer you to hold back; we've got a ladder, and by Jiminy! you go with us this time!"
The ladder was put against the side of the hut, and Pitt Packard climbed up, took his jack-knife, slit the woven door from top to bottom, and turned back the flap.
The men could see the inside of the chamber now. They were humorous persons who could strain a joke to the snapping point, but they felt, at last, that there was nothing especially amusing in the situation.
Tom was huddled in a heap on the straw bed in the far corner.
The vacant smile had fled from his face, and he looked, for the first time in his life, quite distraught.
"Come along, Tom," said the sheriff kindly;
"we 're going to take you where you can sleep in a bed, and have three meals a day."
"I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding," sang Tom quaveringly, as he hid his head in a paroxysm of fear.
"Well, there ain't no bloomin' gardings to walk in jest now, so come along and be peaceable."
"Tom don' want to go to the poor-farm," he wailed piteously.
But there was no alternative. They dragged him off the bed and down the ladder as gently as possible; then Rube Hobson held him on the back seat of the wagon, while the sheriff unhitched the horse.
