The Forged Coupon And Other Stories

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... a puppy or so in her lair behind the potato house--were swept. Neck and neck with the copper turkey cock came Old Michael, equal in malignity, but less active. He was nominally a stable helper, and was also a self-constituted spy in the service of the government--or rather of the governess--and a more implacable talebearer never truckled to authorities. "The two o' them is round back o' the cow-house, Miss. It's now this minute I seen them climbing out over the garden gate!" Thus we, prone on the slant of the cowhouse roof, under the drooping laurel branches, with our pockets crammed with green, young apples, have listened, panting, to our betrayal. Any other man on the place would have lied in our cause with chapter and verse. There was a tradition about Old Michael that he had once been bitten by a mad dog, and had thereupon, as a recognised antidote, killed the dog and eaten its liver. There was something luridly attractive about the transaction, and we often discussed the possibility as to whether the liver had thoroughly played its part, and whether it might not be that he suffered from slight chronic hydrophobia, and that, at any moment, he might turn snarling and foaming upon us. His ordinary manner lent itself to the fancy, his rages were so explosive, his yells at the horses under his charge so ungoverned, so screeching. One of these was a white pony that might have walked straight out of a fairy tale, in which he would have been exclusively employed as palfrey to the principal Princess. He had been bought through, or from, we never quite knew which, an old farmer, one Jer Sullivan, who lived at the head of a long and lonely Atlantic cove, and was as much fisherman as farmer, and more beggar than either. His main...