“Ef all the foxes on the mounting war ter hold a pertracted meet’n, jes’ ter pleasure you-uns, thar wouldn’t be enough scalps an’ ears ’mongst ’em ter make up the money ye hanker fur ter buy a horse.”

To buy a horse was the height of Birt’s ambition.  His mother was a widow; and as an instance of the fact that misfortunes seldom come singly, the horse on which the family depended to till their scanty acres died shortly after his owner.  And so, whenever the spring opened and the ploughs all over the countryside were starting, their one chance to cultivate a crop was to hire a mule from their nearest neighbor, the tanner.  Birt was the eldest son, and his mother had only his work to offer in payment.  The proposition always took the tanner in what he called a “jubious time.”  Spring is the season for stripping the trees of their bark, which is richer in tannin when the sap flows most freely, and the mule was needed to haul up the piles of bark from out the depths of the woods to the tanyard.  Then, too, Jubal Perkins had his own crops to put in.  As he often remarked in the course of the negotiation, “I don’t eat tan bark—­ nor yit raw hides.”  Although the mule was a multifarious animal, and ploughed and worked in the bark-mill, and hauled from the woods, and went long journeys in the wagon or under the saddle, he was not ubiquitous, and it was impossible for him to be in the several places in which he was urgently needed at the same time.  Therefore, to hire him out on these terms seemed hardly an advantage to his master.  Nevertheless, this bargain was annually struck.  The poverty-stricken widow always congratulated herself upon its conclusion, and it never occurred to her that the amount of work that Birt did in the tanyard was a disproportionately large return for the few days that the tanner’s mule ploughed their little fields.

Birt, however, was beginning to see that a boy to drive that mule around the bark-mill was as essential as the mule himself.  As Providence had failed to furnish the tanner with a son for this purpose—­his family consisting of several small daughters—­Birt supplied a long-felt want.

The boy appreciated that his simple mother was over-reached, yet he could not see that she could do otherwise.  He sighed for independence, for a larger opportunity.  As he drove the mule round the limited circuit, his mind was far away.  He anxiously canvassed the future.  He cherished fiery, ambitious schemes,—­often scorched, poor fellow, by their futility.  With his time thus mortgaged, he thought his help to his mother was far less than it might be.  But until he could have a horse of his own, there was no hope—­no progress.  And for this he planned, and dreamed, and saved.

Partly these considerations, partly the love of adventure, and partly the jeer in Nate’s laugh determined him not to relinquish the price set upon the fox’s head.  He took off his coat and flung it on the ground beside his rifle.  Then he began to clamber up the cliff.