The Mystery of the Canebrake by Mason Richard

Author:Mason, Richard [Mason, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: BWM Books
Published: 2012-04-10T04:30:00+00:00

John Clayton shook his head at my attempt at doctoring, and we walked down to the barn where Mr. Bill was waiting.

“Come on, Mr. Bill, we’ll slip out the back of the barn and across the peach orchard to the Swamp.”

“Here, Sniffer, here,” I hollered walking by our house. Sniffer slowly crawled out from under the house where he’d been curled up sleeping.

“Dang, Richard, old Sniffer is really stove up. Maybe we should leave him here.”

“Naw, he’s just old and stiff. It’ll do him good to move ’round a little bit.”

Sniffer whined and limped along as we started for the Swamp. We left the barn in the dim light of a late winter afternoon, and soon we were at Mr. Bill lean-to.

“Dang, Richard, I’m just glad you’ve got a flashlight. Walking around in the dark in this Swamp scares the devil outta me.”

“Mr. Bill, we’ll be back on Saturday, and I’m gonna bring a couple of axes and a hatchet. We’re gonna build you a better lean-to. The next time it turns cold you can get in out of the weather a little better.”

We left Mr. Bill with a roaring fire and a bunch more of Grandmother’s quilts wrapped around him, and walked back through the Swamp to my house.

For the rest of the winter, we made several trips a week to visit Mr. Bill and deliver him groceries. It took us several Saturdays to help him build a better lean-to, but after cutting about 20 willow poles, which we stacked around and covered the top with cane, Mr. Bill had something that kinda looked like a cabin. But it still had a lot of cracks where the wind could blow through.

After being in that cabin/lean-to when a cold north wind started blowing, we decided that we just had to stop up those cracks. The next Saturday it had warmed up and after hearing about the pioneers in history class how they used clay and mud to seal the cracks, we spent the entire day on the bank of Flat Creek scraping up red clay that we carried back and stuffed in the cracks of Mr. Bill’s cabin. It took all day, but when it was almost dark we stopped looked at the job. It just looked terrible, but it did keep the wind out, and after we carried an old beat-up tarpaulin down there and put it over the top of the cabin, it didn’t leak.

Heck, Mr. Bill was really doing pretty good considering the mess he’d been in right after Christmas.

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