University of Virginia Library

4. IV.

From that night, however, the halcyon days of
Spec and Shat were at an end. The Mewkers
loved to ride, but they had no horses: the only
living thing standing upon four legs belonging to
Mr. Mewker was an ugly, half-starved, cross-grained,
suspicious looking dog, that had the
mange and a bad reputation. Of course, the Captain's
horses were at their service, for rides to the
beach, for pic-nics in the woods, for shopping in the
village, or, perchance, to take Mr. Mewker to some
distant church-meeting. And not only were the
horses absent at unusual times; there seemed to be
a growing fondness in the Captain for late hours.
The old-style regularity of the Oakery, the time-honored
habits of early hours to bed, the usual procession
up the stairs, formal but cheerful, were, in
some measure, broken into; not but what these
were observed as formerly; not but what every
member of the family waited and watched until
the Captain returned, no matter how late; but
that sympathetic feeling which all had felt when
the hour of bed-time came, had ceased to be,
and in its place was the dreary languor, the tiresome,

tedious feeling that those experience who sit
up and wait and wait, for an absent one, waiting
and asking, “Why tarry the wheels of his chariot?”
There was an increasing presentiment, a gloomy
foreshadowing of evil, in Miss Augusta's mind at
those doings of the Captain: and this feeling was
heightened by something, trifling in itself, yet still
mysterious and unaccountable. Somebody, almost
every day, cut off a tolerably large piece from the
beef or mutton, or whatever kind of meat there
chanced to be in the cellar. And nobody knew
anything about it. Hannah was fidelity itself; Jim
was beyond suspicion; Adolphus never went into
the cellar, scarcely out of the library, in fact. The
Captain! could it be her brother? Miss Augusta
watched. She saw him do it! She saw him
covertly draw his jack-knife from his pocket, and
purloin a piece of beautiful rump-steak, then wrap
it in paper, put it in his pocket, and walk off
whistling, as if nothing had happened. “The
widow is at the bottom of this!” was the thought
that flashed through the mind of Augusta. She
was indirectly correct. The widow was at the
bottom of the theft, and I will tell you how. I
have mentioned a large mangy dog, of disreputable
character, Mr. Mewker's property, and “Bose” by
name. Whenever the Captain drove up the path to
the house of his friend, there, beside the step of the
wagon, from the time it passed the gate until it
reached the porch, was this dog, with a tail short
as pie-crust, that never wagged; thick, wicked
eyes, and a face that did not suggest fidelity and
sagacity, but treachery and rapine, dead sheep, and
larceny great or small. And although the Captain
was a stout, active, well-framed man, with a rosy
cheek, a bright eye, and a sprightly head of hair,
yet he was afraid of that dog. And therefore the
Captain, to conciliate Bose, brought him every day
some choice morsel from his own kitchen; and as
he did not dare to tell Augusta, the same was
abstracted in the manner already described.

Here I must mention a peculiarity in Captain
Belgrave's character. He never saw a dog without
thinking of hydrophobia; he never bathed on
the beautiful beach in the rear of his house without
imagining every chip in the water, or ripple on the
wave, to be the dorsal fin of some voracious shark.
When he drove home at night, it was with fear and
trembling, for an assassin might be lurking in the
bushes; and if he passed a sick neighbor, he

walked off with small-pox, measles, typhoid, and
whooping-cough trundling at his heels. In a word,
he was the most consummate coward in Little-Crampton.
It was for this reason he had built and
slept in the tower; and what with reading of
pirates, buccaneers, Captain Kidd, and Black
Beard, his mind was so infected that no sleeping-place
seemed secure and safe, but his own turret
and trap-door, scarp, counter-scarp, ditch, and
glacis, through which all invaders had to pass before
they encountered him with his tremendous
horse-pistol.

It was not the discovery of the theft alone that
had opened the eyes of Augusta in regard to her
brother's motions. Although he had told her,
again and again, that he merely went to Mewker's
to talk over church matters, yet she knew intuitively,
as every woman would, that, a widow so
lovely as Harriet Laseiver could not but have great
attractions for such an old bachelor as her brother.
In fact, she knew, if the widow, as the phrase is,
“set her cap for him,” the Captain was a lost man.
But to whom could she apply for counsel and assistance?
Adolphus? Adolphus had no more sense
than a kitten. Hannah? There was something of

the grand old spinster-spirit about Augusta that
would not bend to the level of Hannah, the help.
Jim? She would go to Jim. She would see that
small boy of sixty, and ask his advice. And she
did. She walked over to the stable in the evening,
while her brother was making his toilet for the
customary visit to the Mewkery, and without beating
around the bush at all, reached the point at
once. “Jim,” said she, “the Captain is getting too
thick with the Mewkers, and we must put a stop to
it, How is that to be done?”

Jim paused for a moment, and then held up his
forefinger. “I know one way to stop him a-goin'
there; and, if you say so, Miss Augusta, then old
Jim is the boy to do it.”

Augusta assented in a grand, old, towering nod.
Jim, with a mere motion of his forefinger, seemed
to reiterate, “If you say so, I'll do it.”

“Yes.”

“Then, by Golly!” responded Jim, joyfully,
“arter this night he'll never go there ag'in.”

Augusta walked toward the house with a smile,
and Jim proceeded to embellish Shatter.

By-and-by the Captain drove off in the wagon,
and old Jim busied himself with Spectator, fitting

a mouldy saddle on his back, and getting him
ready for action.