But on this day he was fallen in hard luck.  His father saw him coming, met him with a “gad” and lashed him furiously.  Knowing perfectly well that the flogging would not stop till the proper effect was produced, and that was to be gauged by the racket, Guy yelled his loudest.  This was the uproar the boys had heard.

“Now, ye idle young scut!  I’ll larn ye to go round leaving bars down.  You go an’ tend to your work.”  So instead of hiking back gloriously laden with Calfskins, Guy was sent to ignominious and un-Injun toil in the garden.

Soon he heard his mother:  “Guysie, Guysie.”  He dropped his hoe and walked to the kitchen.

“Where you goin’?” roared his father from afar.  “Go back and mind your work.”

“Maw wants me.  She called me.”

“You mind your work.  Don’t you dar’ on your life to go thayer.”

But Guy took no notice and walked on to his mother.  He knew that at this post-thrashing stage of wrath his father was mouthy and harmless, and soon he was happy eating a huge piece of bread and jam.

“Poor dear, you must be hungry, an’ your Paw was so mean to you.  There, now, don’t cry,” for Guy began to weep again at the recollection of his wrongs.  Then she whispered confidentially:  “Paw’s going to Downey’s this afternoon, an’ you can slip away as soon as he’s gone, an’ if you work well before that he won’t be so awful mad after you come back.  But be sure you don’t let down the bars, coz if the pig was to get in Raften’s woods dear knows what.”

This was the reason of Guy’s delay.  He did not return to camp with the skins till late that day.  As soon as he was gone, his foolish, doting mother, already crushed with the burden of the house, left everything and hoed two or three extra rows of cabbages, so “Paw” should find a great showing of work when he came back.

The Calfskins were hard as tin and, of course, had the hair on.

Caleb remarked, “It’ll take two or three days to get them right,” and buried them in a marshy, muddy pool in the full sunlight.  “The warmer the better.”

Three days later he took them out.  Instead of being thin, hard, yellow, semi-transparent, they now were much thicker, densely white, and soft as silk.  The hair was easily scraped off and the two pieces were pronounced all right for drumheads.

Caleb washed them thoroughly in warm water, with soap to clear off the grease, scraping them on both sides with a blunt knife; then he straightened the outer edge of the largest, and cut a thin strip round and round it till he had some sixty feet of rawhide line, about three-quarters of an inch wide.  This he twisted, rolled and stretched until it was nearly round, then he cut from the remainder a circular piece thirty inches across, and a second from the “unchawed” part of the other skin.  He laid these one on the other, and with the sharp point of a knife he made a row of holes in both, one inch from the edge