NOVEMBER—THE MAGIC MOON When Black Frost comes to the lowlands, he sometimes loiters for many nights along the river meadows, and sometimes climbs swiftly into the hill country, Wabeno the Magician always following in his wake cloaked in the golden haze of dreams called Indian Summer.
Through the long nights the Magic Moon lights the little beasts to their hunting, but ice fingers lock the shallow pools before day dawn, and, in spite of alluring sunny noons, both man and beast seek shelter, one by the fireside, where the singing logs repeat the songs they once learned from the rain on the leaves in the forest, the other in ground hole, rock lair, or, if sociably inclined, in house chinks, and crannies. In this particular November, however, the village of Oaklands was undergoing a new and strange experience born of the sudden preference of a nimble, four-footed rodent for houses with warm cellars and well-stocked larders, over the more remote barns and granaries. In short, the north end of the village, and some of the outlying houses as well, were suffering from a raid of rats that would have competed in numbers with the army lured to cover by the Pied Piper.
All country dwellers expect to house a few of the wood folk in the hard season, whether they will or no. The bats hang themselves up in the attic behind the chimney, and the squirrels use a loose shingle as a storehouse door; the wood rats burrow under the stable floor, and the pretty, white-footed mouse with pelt and eyes like a deer will often venture to the hearth corner, and not only remain unharmed, but even make himself a welcome guest by his strange singing.
Rats, however,—the great relentless rats of city docks and sewers, that carry both destruction and disease in their march,—are a wholly different matter.
The plague had its beginning in what was considered a necessary improvement for the health of the village as well as its morals, the demolition of an old tavern that for a century had stood at the crossways opposite the railway station at the side of the road where, a few hundred rods higher up, was Martin Cortright’s cottage. The tavern, a relic of stage-coach days, and flanked by great barns and pastures of many acres that reached uphill quite to the Cortrights’ boundaries, had gradually fallen, until it became a road-house of the worst type, with its barns crumbling, filthy with the litter of years, and the land used for the rooting-ground of a breed of black swill-fed pigs. Its malodour had so offended the nose of public spirit as embodied in the Anglican Catholic, the Severely Protestant, Mrs. Jenks-Smith, Martin Cortright, and father, as health officer, that a public subscription had been secured, the place bought, the buildings, including the pig-pens, razed, and the land ploughed up to sweeten, preparatory to turning the plot into a sort of park to be a playground for the school children. All this had taken place in the early spring, and by fall every trace and odour of the nuisance that had existed was gone; but the Committee, when they had paid off all scores, had not reckoned with the rats that for generations had been housed upon the premises. During the summer, these rats evidently turned tramps, and, using the wide-chinked stone fences for runways, by which they travelled from farm to farm, lived in luxury, unobserved, though everywhere came complaint of the loss of young chickens and eggs, this being laid to cats, hawks, and weasels. But no sooner did Black Frost show himself than the winter homing instinct that comes upon man, as well as the lesser animals, seized the rats, and from all sides they began to travel back to their old haunts; these lacking, they sought the nearest shelter.
The Cortrights were away in early autumn, and late the first night after their return, Lavinia, candle in hand, going down the front stairs of her well-ordered and supposedly mouse-proof house, encountered a gray-whiskered rat coming up with so fixed a purpose, that even her shrieks and Martin’s coming only drove him to the hall below where, according to the testimony of Martin and Lavinia, he backed into a corner and put up a successful fight against Martin, armed with an umbrella, the wall paper receiving the whole of the damage. The maid, intrenched in the hall above, whispered a different version of the encounter, which was that the Master, being short-sighted, and lacking his glasses, had charged at the corner where the rat was not, much to the rat’s advantage.
Be this as it may, the postmaster, after having a ham cleaned to the bone and some valuable mail gnawed, tried traps in vain and resorted to poison, with the dire result that, in a week, after the stove fires were started, his family were obliged to go to his wife’s mother’s, while the movable part of the business took refuge in a corner of the Town House. Soon the one absorbing topic in Oaklands, that eclipsed even the town and presidential elections, both of which fell due that November, taking precedence of the local tax rate, new roads, tariff, tainted money, or trusts, was—“What shall we do with the rats?”
The Village Pharmacy, as the chief shop of the place is called, has many attributes of a department store and club-room as well, in the cold months. Here the men meet, who do not care to stay at home, or go to read in the library, foregather in the saloon, or play poker by a lantern in a corner of the windowless blacksmith’s shop. Among these, the rats came as a new subject, that was welcome, if its cause was not.
Better still, the Pharmacy coterie had a recent recruit and one that added not a little to the spice of its life, one Tom Scott, who owned a Queen Anne villa (no, it wasn’t a house or a cottage; if you know the modern English suburban home of this type, you will understand), together with all the proper outside ornaments, and ten acres of land halfway up the east road to the Bluffs. The place was close to what Evan, in the earlier and snobbish days of the Bluff Colony, used to call “the dead line,” because in the beginning there had been social war to the knife between the big landowners who lived above the line, and the small owners of the commuting tribe who lived below.
Mr. Scott had lived in Oaklands for eight years, during which time his two golden-haired daughters had turned from apple-cheeked schoolgirls to young women with the regular profiles and peculiar modulation of voice that tell of English origin. Their mother had the same features, voice, and colouring, but slimness had developed into the turtlesque figure of a staunch type of British matron in her early fifties, who has no American prototype. Fat women we have galore, but they usually carry their weight gaily, not ponderously, and seldom outlive their capability for wearing shirtwaists.
Mr. Scott was unmistakably English, tall, broad-shouldered, rosy, clean-shaven, and sixty, his closely cut, crisp gray hair showing no thinness at the crown and his deep-set eyes alert and keen to everything that went on about him, although he was not a man of many words and seldom entered into conversation of his own free will. In short, he was the type of the old country farmer, who, clad in cords and gaiters, spends half his time riding about his place on a deep-chested hunter, and is an ardent follower of the hounds when the chase does not interfere with market day. His speech, though usually correct, broadened with certain words; his s took the sound of z, and sometimes, when excited, he reversed his vowels.
That he was a man of some means, was evinced by the fact that he owned his home, paid as he went, contributed freely to local charities, had three or four good horses, kept and bred dogs, farmed his land for pleasure rather than profit, and displayed a love of sport by his interest in the county and local fairs and horse shows. At the same time he had evidently retired from active business life, as he only went to the city one day in the week, as any man of leisure might, who, though loving an out-of-door life, did not wish to cut entirely loose from old associations.
For the rest, though he was referred to familiarly as Tom Scott by all the men of his own age, and a good many of the younger ones, and considered by all a square fellow, not one, if they had been questioned about the matter, could have told from whence he came, or that his previous occupation had in any way been mentioned.
When a new family comes to Oaklands, the natives have three tests by which the strangers are graded and accorded citizenship in one of several degrees, the first being financial, the second, moral, and the third, social. Have they paid for their house in full, or is it held on mortgage? Will they take a church pew, and if so, in which one of the four churches? Does the man of the family wear a collar, tie, and coat when at rest in the bosom of his family?—appearing in shirtsleeves upon the front porch, even of a hot summer evening, no longer being permitted by the rising generation of daughters trained at the Bridgeton High School.
The Scotts had passed the tests in a manner satisfactory to all, immediately taking a pew, neither aggressively toward the front, nor yet economically in the rear, in our equivalent of the Established Church, of which, it seemed, they were all members. Thus the only questioning murmurs that had ever arisen about the head of the family came from a few discontented people who had considered Tom Scott an inexperienced city man of money, and therefore had tried, but tried in vain, to sell him either an unsound horse, badly cured hay, or other farm produce of poor quality, but at a price above the market rates. To these Scott quickly showed so much horse lore, and such a shrewd and experienced side to his character in general, that they voiced the opinion between themselves that he wasn’t, in their judgment, what he seemed to be, and that if it were known how and where he made his money—“well, gambling and horse-racing had made many a fortune, and the ’Piscopals should go slow before they committed themselves to his iniquities and asked him to pass the plate.”
Few guests from outside ever went to the Queen Anne villa, and though Mrs. Scott and her daughters joined in the milder social diversions of the village, it was suddenly announced, the fall after they graduated from the high school and something in the nature of a party was expected of them, that mother and daughters were going to the old country to spend Christmas, but that Tom Scott himself would stay behind and keep bachelor’s hall. Then again the murmurers said: “Why doesn’t he go with them? Has he done anything that prevents his going home?”
It was a little after this time that Scott, an inveterate home lover, and now lonely and hungering for companionship, appeared at the Pharmacy, his mantle of reserve replaced by an almost garrulous familiarity. His first act was to buy a box of really fine cigars, which he passed about freely among his fellows, only frowning at the one outsider, a drummer, who, pushing his way into the group, prepared to take a fistful at once. “Slow, young man, go slow,” Scott said deliberately, measuring the fellow with a single sweep of the eye; “when you ask a gentleman to drink, he doesn’t fill five glasses before he empties the first, does he?”
The drummer slunk back with an exclamation half impertinent, half apologetic, and at that moment the door was flung open, and Martin Cortright entered, agitation written on every feature of his usually calm student face; going directly to the proprietor, who was leaning over the soda-water counter, he called in a voice very unlike his usual quiet tones:—
“Give me some rough-on-rats, and any other poison you have; if they die in the house, and we have to leave, so be it. My patience is exhausted. To-day, while we were out driving, the rats, or a rat, actually got into my little book room, though it has a hardwood floor and high wainscot, and gnawed the corner off the antique leather binding of my ‘Denton’s History of New York’; if this continues, imagine the condition of my library!”
“Why don’t you cover all the food in the house and try traps, Mr. Cortright?” asked Tom Scott, turning abruptly from the group who were discussing the merits of a litter of bull pups that were asleep in a box behind the candy counter.
“Traps!” ejaculated Martin. “We have tried five different kinds, and rats managed to take the bait from four, without snapping the springs, and the fifth, the wire-cage variety, they must have rolled about the kitchen like a toy, for we found it in a corner standing on end. My belief is, Mr. Scott, that intelligence in rats varies, as it does in human beings, and that these particular specimens are what might be called intellectual, and are only to be circumvented and trapped, if at all, by some one who understands their own methods. How do they get into the house? The foundations are solid, the cellar plastered, and with a cement floor that shows no holes, and yet in the space of a month there is hardly a door in the house that does not show the marks of their teeth.”
“You are perfectly right,” said Scott, with the utmost seriousness, interest sparkling in his eyes; “they must be understood and met on their own ground, for they have surely some runway by which they enter and leave, and no two tribes of rats work in exactly the same way, any more than any two gangs of housebreakers handle their tools alike.” Then, as he saw that all eyes were fixed on him inquiringly, he added, in the most casual way possible, “I’ve always been keen on watching animals to learn their ways, and as a young chap I had some queer experiences with rats.”
“Why don’t you take up the reward offered, and clear the town of the rats?” asked the drummer, sneeringly; “a gent who’s so well acquainted with their ways ought to find it a cinch.”
The sneer passed unnoticed. “Have the Selectmen offered a reward in the matter?” Scott asked.
“Yes, posted this afternoon,” said the druggist; “there is one of the bills on the tree opposite. One hundred dollars’ reward for any one who will either do the job or suggest a remedy.”
For a full minute Tom Scott stood with his hands in his pockets looking into the show window and whistling softly to himself as if he were alone; then squaring about he almost called, so loud was his voice, “I’ve time on my hands now, and I’m going to take up that challenge, boys: if I make the rats go in my traps, I’ll give the hundred to the Bridgeton Hospital; if they don’t, I’ll add a hundred to the sum to make it bigger bait for a smarter fellow.”
“I wish you could start to-night and begin at my house, but of course that is asking too much; my wife and the maids are completely upset,” Martin Cortright said beseechingly, as though Scott were some sort of priest whose incantations would bring immediate relief to the nerves of the feminine part of the household, and safety to his own beloved books.
“No, I was going to suggest that myself; I must get the lay of the land a bit before I can plan my game, and night’s the only time for that. I must go to my house first for a few things that may come handy. Has any one a team outside?”
“I have,” said father, who had opened the door as the conversation began, only entering far enough to hand some prescriptions to the druggist, with a few words of directions concerning their filling. “I must wait about for an hour at least, so that I can drive you up and back again as well as not. What, you are going to try and rid us of this plague? Surely, then, as health officer, it is my duty to give you a lift.”
“Thank you, Dr. Russell,” said Scott, still in a sort of dream, as the two went out together.
“I wonder where Tom Scott got acquainted with rats,” said the first Selectman, who had all this time been playing chess imperturbably with the Town Clerk upon the top of a barrel of pop-corn balls.
“In jail, most likely; that’s a thriving place for ’em, and there’s plenty of time to watch ’em,” sneered the drummer, who had just reached into the cigar box that Scott had left upon the counter, only to find that its owner had pocketed the remaining contents.
“You speak as if you’d had personal experience. I see you list rat-traps in your hardware side line,” said the Town Clerk, tartly. He liked Scott, and also as a native he resented such remarks from a stranger.
“Mated!” cried the first Selectman, and the coterie began to break up.
Tom Scott and father drove along for a few moments in silence, and then father asked him some questions about Mrs. Hobbs, the friend of Martha Saunders, who was Scott’s housekeeper during the absence of his wife.
“She’s a good woman and a fine cook, but, Dr. Russell, she’s too stiff for comfort; she serves my meals as if I was a gentleman, which I’m not, and never pretended, and won’t sit down at table with me.”
Father was somewhat surprised at this remark, for he only realized Scott as intelligent and a straightforward man of his word, and, further than this, social classification never entered his head.
The house reached, Scott deftly fastened and blanketed the horses, opened the door with a latch-key, and, leading the way through several dimly lit rooms, said, “Perhaps you’ll kindly wait in here in my sitting-room while I hunt about for what I need; there’s always a bit of fire in here, sir, and it’s less lonely than the empty big rooms.”
As soon as father accustomed himself to the light, he saw he was in what is commonly known as a den. A low book-case filled one side, above which hung some good sporting prints in colour, pictures of famous horses, all winners of the Derby, mingled with a few really fine engravings of English rural scenes by Birket Foster, and others of his school. In the bay window was a combination table and writing-desk, upon which papers were littered, a tray of pipes acting as a paper-weight, while three framed photographs and a work-basket of ample proportions spoke of the absent wife and daughte............