"Why, I watched my chance," answered Tom, "till one day I 'got the drap'

on my jailer, to employ their own language. With a c.o.c.ked gun at his breast, I made him promise not to follow me, and then I retreated 'in good order' as the soldiers say, down the mountain, with both barrels c.o.c.ked. But really, fellows, you can have no idea of the abject poverty or the inconceivable indolence of these people. The little energy they have is expended in making illicit whiskey and sneaking it down the mountain without getting caught. Many of them have already served long terms in prison, but they regard that merely as a manifestation of the law's injustice, just as they do the hanging of one of their number now and then, when he is caught shooting an agent of the revenue. They don't understand. They are as ignorant as they are poor, and their poverty exceeds anything that it is possible for us to conceive."

By this time Tom's scant strength was exhausted, and after muttering: "That's anybody's wild hog," he turned himself over in bed and went to sleep.

CHAPTER IX

_A Sunday Discussion_

"I say, Tom," said the Doctor, on Sunday morning, after the breakfast things had been cleared away, and the first fire had been lighted in the new fireplace, "I want to ask you something about your experience on your hunting trips."

"Go on, Doctor. No boy of sixteen--and we've voted you to be of that age--can ask me anything that I'll hesitate to answer."

"Thank you," said the Doctor, with a laugh. "Now, think of me as exactly sixteen and tell me all about it. As I understand, you have frequently spent from a week to ten days in the mountains, living exclusively upon what you could kill."

"So far, Doctor, you are absolutely right," answered the boy, who, having laid aside his headache, was disposed to be facetious.

"Well, that must have been animal food exclusively," said the Doctor.

"Absolutely," answered Tom. "I had always a little of the mineral food salt to season it with, but as for bread or potatoes, or anything else of a vegetable character, why I simply couldn't get them."

"All right. Now, the theory is that a man must have starchy foods in order to keep in good health. You had no starchy food for from a week to two weeks at a time on each of these occasions, but lived exclusively on meat. Now, what effects of this diet did you observe?"

"None whatever, except that little Tom Ridsdale had a mighty keen relish for bread when he got home again."

The Doctor then asked detailed questions as to particular symptoms, to all of which the substance of Tom's replies was that in his case no symptoms whatever had manifested themselves. "I think, Doctor," he added, "as the result of my own experience that a healthy young human animal like me, when living night and day in the open air and taking a great deal of exercise, can eat pretty much anything he pleases that we commonly recognize as food, or rather anything of that kind that he can get--without much danger of injuring himself. No, I don't know so well about that. Once, I got hurt in the mountains, and lived for a week in a barn, eating nothing but corn. I was all right in a general way, but I suffered a good deal with cold. When I got out and killed a 'c.o.o.n and roasted and ate it, the weather seemed suddenly to warm up."

"Precisely," answered the Doctor. "The fat of the c.o.o.n furnished you with fuel, and you needed it. The more I study the subject, the more firmly convinced I become of two things--first, that man is essentially a carnivorous, or meat-eating animal, and second, that while starchy foods are desirable as a part of his diet, they are not absolutely necessary to him, except at comparatively long intervals. You know a baby simply cannot digest starchy foods at all. It would starve to death with a stomach full of them. Every baby lives exclusively upon the animal food milk."

"Yes," answered Jack, "but so does every colt and every calf. Yet, neither horses nor cows eat any animal food whatever after they cease to be colts and calves."

"That is true," said the Doctor, meditatively. "I hadn't thought of that." Then, after a minute's thought, he added--"but neither cows nor horses have any carnivorous teeth whatever, any teeth fit for the chewing of meat, while man has. Besides that, physicians have observed that behind almost every case of obstinate, low fevers and that sort of debilitated disease, there is a history of underfeeding, and particularly of an insufficient use of meat, whether as a matter of necessity, or merely as a matter of choice. Persons who eat no meat, or very little meat, may seem very robust so long as positive disease does not attack them, but when they contract maladies of a serious sort, they are very likely to show a lack of stamina, a deficiency of recuperative power."

"Then you don't believe at all, any more than we meat-eating Virginians do--in the doctrines of the vegetarians?" asked Jack, as he finished the hind legs of a broiled squirrel.

"It will be time enough," answered the Doctor, "to consider the doctrines of the vegetarians when they agree among themselves as to what those doctrines are."

"Why, how do you mean?" asked Tom.

"Well, some vegetarians held a congress, or a convention, or something of that sort in New York a little while ago. There were only fifty-seven of them present, I believe, and yet they managed to split their congress up into four groups, each antagonizing the views of all the others with something approaching violence of temper."

"What were their differences?" asked Tom.

"Well first of all there was a group who advocated the eating of vegetable matters only, except that they saw no harm in the use of milk, eggs, cheese and b.u.t.ter. Next there was a group who bitterly condemned milk, eggs, cheese and b.u.t.ter as animal foods, tending to inflame evil pa.s.sions and utterly to be rejected, though they ate milk biscuit and b.u.t.ter crackers. This second group looked with favor upon all fruits and vegetables, but here a third group took issue with them, contending that only those vegetables should be eaten which grow above ground, and utterly rejecting the thought of eating potatoes, parsnips, beets, turnips, onions, carrots, radishes and other things that develop beneath the surface of the earth. Finally there was a fourth group that agreed with the third except that they made a plea in behalf of celery, on the ground that it is naturally a plant growing above ground and is artificially imbedded in earth only by way of making it tender and palatable."

"But how about circuses then?" asked Tom.

"I don't understand," the Doctor answered.

"Why how can anybody go to a circus without eating peanuts? And about three-fourths of all the peanuts are developed under ground by burying the blossoms."

"It's all very funny," said Jack. "But the funniest thing about it is the fetish worship of that word 'vegetable.' Patent medicines are often advertised as 'purely vegetable,' as if that settled the question of their harmlessness. Yet I know at least a dozen 'purely vegetable'

plants that grow in these woods which are poisonous."

"Of course," answered the Doctor, "and for that matter the most virulent poisons known to man are 'purely vegetable.' There's strychnia for example, as purely vegetable in its origin as apple-b.u.t.ter itself is.

And there are others, such as morphine, stramonium, and nux vomica and worst of all hydrocyanic acid, commonly called prussic acid. That is so deadly that it is almost never made or kept in its pure state, because a single whiff of its fumes in the nostrils would kill almost instantly.

Yet it is an extract of peach pits or bitter almonds."

"Well now I say," broke in Tom, "let's return to the subject of foods, for I am hungry, and I'm going to declare war on the Doctor if he doesn't let me have some light thing to eat like a chop from that wild boar or something of an equally digestible sort."

"Well, we'll see about that," said the Doctor, going to Tom's bed and examining and redressing his wounds. After the inspection he said:

"You were entirely right, Tom, when you called yourself a perfectly healthy human animal a little while ago. I never yet saw wounds heal in the way they are doing on you. So you may sit up for dinner to-day, and you may have whatever you want to eat."

"All right!" cried Tom, hastily scrambling out of bed. "My clamor is for pork. How are you going to cook the pig boys?"

After a little consultation, it was decided to hang the shoat before the great fire in the new fire place, and roast it whole.

"After all, it doesn't weigh more than forty pounds, and that isn't much to divide between six of us," said Harry, laughingly.

"And besides," added Ed, "roast wild shoat is as good cold as hot, or rather better. So we'll roast the gentleman whole, and I for one volunteer to sit down before him and baste him so that all the juices that belong to him shall be found succulently pervading his muscular structure."

"I'll help in that," called Jim Chenowith from outside the cabin, where he was just finishing a turn of guard duty.

Thus the little company rested and grew strong during the Sunday, and by bed time they were eager for the morning and the hard, outdoor work of tree felling that it would bring with it. With a great glowing blaze in the fireplace, which each sentinel replenished with wood before summoning his successor to take his place, the log hut seemed a delightful place to sleep in.

CHAPTER X

_Beginning Work_

The Doctor was the first "boy" to crawl out of bed in the morning. He carefully inspected his weather instruments and reported:

"It's a stinging morning. Thermometer only ten degrees above zero outside; wind North-northwest, and blowing at twenty miles an hour; barometric pressure very high, indicating prolonged clear and cold weather; hygrometer indicating a minimum of moisture in the atmosphere, promises a clear sky and a bright sun to-day."

"Good!" shouted the other boys. "Now for a hearty breakfast to begin with."

"Well I for one am going to begin with an invigorating cold bath," said the Doctor seizing a sponge and two towels and running nearly naked through the biting air, to the spring under the cliff. After a shudder of hesitation all the other boys gave chase to him.

The bathing trough was not yet in place, but by dipping sponges into the sluiceway that flowed out of the spring, and rapidly drenching their bodies with the intensely cold water, gasping for breath as they did so, they all set their blood aflow and their skins a-tingling. Then, vigorously rubbing themselves with towels as they went, they ran to the cabin and there dressed before a mighty fire of freshly replenished logs.

"Why does a bath like that feel so good after it's over?" asked Jack.