Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin

lose that cow,” he said. “Come out, will ye, Hannah, and hold the lantern? I can’t do anything with my right hand in a sling, and Bill is the stupidest critter in the country.”

      Everybody went out to the barn accordingly, except the doctor’s wife, who ran over to her house to see if her brother Moses had come home from Milltown, and could come and take a hand in the exercises.

      Buttercup was in a bad way; there was no doubt of it. Something, one of the turnips, presumably, had lodged in her throat, and would move neither way, despite her attempts to dislodge it. Her breathing was labored, and her eyes bloodshot from straining and choking. Once or twice they succeeded in getting her mouth partly open, but before they could fairly discover the cause of trouble she had wrested her head away.

      “I can see a little tuft of green sticking straight up in the middle,” said Uncle Cash, while Bill Peters and Moses held a lantern on each side of Buttercup’s head; “but, land! It’s so far down, and such a mite of a thing, I couldn’t git it, even if I could use my right hand. S’pose you try, Bill.”

      Bill hemmed and hawed, and confessed he didn’t care to try. Buttercup’s grinders were of good size and excellent quality, and he had no fancy for leaving his hand within her jaws. He said he was no good at that kind of work, but that he would help Uncle Cash hold the cow’s head; that was just as necessary, and considerable safer.

      Moses was more inclined to the service of humanity, and did his best, wrapping his wrist in a cloth, and making desperate but ineffectual dabs at the slippery green turnip-tops in the reluctantly opened throat. But the cow tossed her head and stamped her feet and switched her tail and wriggled from under Bill’s hands, so that it seemed altogether impossible to reach the seat of the trouble.

      Uncle Cash was in despair, fuming and fretting the more because of his own crippled hand.

      “Hitch up, Bill,” he said, “and, Hannah, you drive over to Milliken’s Mills for the horse-doctor. I know we can git out that turnip if we can hit on the right tools and somebody to manage em right; but we’ve got to be quick about it or the critter’ll choke to death, sure! Your hand’s so clumsy, Mose, she thinks her time’s come when she feels it in her mouth, and your fingers are so big you can’t ketch holt o’ that green stuff thout its slippin’!”

      “Mine ain’t big; let me try,” said a timid voice, and turning round, they saw little Elisha Simpson, his trousers pulled on over his night-shirt, his curly hair ruffled, his eyes vague with sleep.

      Uncle Cash gave a laugh of good-humored derision. “You—that’s afraid to drive a cow to pasture? No, sir; you hain’t got sand enough for this job, I guess!”

      Buttercup just then gave a worse cough than ever, and her eyes rolled in her head as if she were giving up the ghost.

      “I’d rather do it than see her choke to death!” cried the boy, in despair.

      “Then, by ginger, you can try it, sonny!” said Uncle Cash. “Now this time we’ll tie her head up. Take it slow, and make a good job of it.”

      Accordingly they pried poor Buttercup’s jaws open to put a wooden gag between them, tied her head up, and kept her as still as they could while the women held the lanterns.

      “Now, sonny, strip up your sleeve and reach as fur down’s you can! Wind your little fingers in among that green stuff stickin’ up there that ain’t hardly big enough to call green stuff, give it a twist, and pull for all you’re worth. Land! What a skinny little pipe stem!”

      The Little Prophet had stripped up his sleeve. It was a slender thing, his arm; but he had driven the red cow all summer, borne her tantrums, protected her from the consequences of her own obstinacy, taking (as he thought) a future owner’s pride in her splendid flow of milk—grown fond of her, in a word, and now she was choking to death. A skinny little pipe stem is capable of a deal at such a time, and only a slender hand and arm could have done the work.

      Elisha trembled with nervousness, but he made a dexterous and dashing entrance into the awful cavern of Buttercup’s mouth; descended upon the tiny clump of green spills or spikes, wound his little fingers in among them as firmly as he could, and then gave a long, steady, determined pull with all the strength in this body. That was not so much in itself, to be sure, but he borrowed a good deal more from some reserve quarter, the location of which nobody knows anything about, but upon which everybody draws in time of need.

      Such a valiant pull you would never have expected of the Little Prophet. Such a pull it was that, to his own utter amazement, he suddenly found himself lying flat on his back on the barn floor with a very slippery something in his hand, and a fair-sized but rather dilapidated turnip at the end of it.

      “That’s the business!” cried Moses.

      “I could ‘a’ done it as easy as nothin’ if my arm had been a leetle mite smaller,” said Bill Peters.

      “You’re a trump, sonny!” exclaimed Uncle Cash, as he helped Moses untie Buttercup’s head and took the gag out.

      “You’re a trump, Lisha, and, by ginger, the cow’s your’n; only don’t you let your blessed pa drink none of her cream!”

      The welcome air rushed into Buttercup’s lungs and cooled her parched, torn throat. She was pretty nearly spent, poor thing, and bent her head (rather gently for her) over the Little Prophet’s shoulder as he threw his arms joyfully about her neck, and whispered, “You’re my truly cow now, ain’t you, Buttercup?”

      “Mrs. Baxter, dear,” said Rebecca, as they walked home to the parsonage together under the young harvest moon; “there are all sorts of cowards, aren’t there, and don’t you think Elisha is one of the best kind.”

      “I don’t quite know what to think about cowards, Rebecca Rowena,” said the minister’s wife hesitatingly. “The Little Prophet is the third coward I have known in my short life who turned out to be a hero when the real testing time came. Meanwhile the heroes themselves—or the ones that were taken for heroes—were always busy doing something, or being somewhere, else.”

      Eighth Chronicle.

       Abner Simpson’s New Leaf

       Table of Contents

      Rebecca had now cut the bonds that bound her to the Riverboro district school, and had been for a week a full-fledged pupil at the Wareham Seminary, towards which goal she had been speeding ever since the memorable day when she rode into Riverboro on the top of Uncle Jerry Cobb’s stagecoach, and told him that education was intended to be “the making of her.”

      She went to and fro, with Emma Jane and the other Riverboro boys and girls, on the morning and evening trains that ran between the academy town and Milliken’s Mills.

      The six days had passed like a dream!—a dream in which she sat in corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from “King Lear,” but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she had not remembered it.

      In these first weeks among strangers she passed for nothing but an interesting-looking, timid, innocent, country child, never revealing, even to the far-seeing Emily Maxwell, a hint of her originality, facility, or power in any direction. Rebecca was fourteen, but so slight, and under the paralyzing new conditions so shy, that she would have been mistaken for twelve had it not been for her general advancement in the school curriculum.

      Growing up in the solitude of a remote farm house, transplanted to a tiny village where she lived with two elderly spinsters, she was still the veriest child in all but the practical duties and responsibilities of life; in those she had long been a