Old Yeller by Fred Gipson Read Free Book Online Page B

saidthat as hot as the day was, he figured he’d like it better sitting in the dog run. So Mama had me bring out our four cowhide bottom chairs. Searcy picked the one I always liked to sit in best. He got out a twist of tobacco and bit off a chew big enough to bulge his cheek and went to chewing and talking and spitting juice right where we’d all be bound to step in it and pack it around on the bottoms of our feet.
    First he asked Mama if we were making out all right, and Mama said we were. Then he told her that he’d been left to look after all the families while the men were gone, a mighty heavy responsibility that was nearly working him to death, but that he was glad to do it. He said for Mama to remember that if the least little thing went wrong, she was to get in touch with him right away. And Mama said she would.
    Then he leaned his chair back against the cabin wall and went on telling what all was going on around in the settlement. He told about how dry the weather was and how he looked for all the corn crops to fail and the settlement folks to be scraping the bottoms of their meal barrels long before next spring. He told how the cowswere going dry and the gardens were failing. He told how Jed Simpson’s boy Rosal was sitting at a turkey roost, waiting for a shot, when a fox came right up and tried to jump on him, and Rosal had to club it to death with his gun butt. This sure looked like a case of hydrophobia to Searcy, as anybody knew that no fox in his right mind was going to jump on a hunter.
    Which reminded him of an uncle of his that got mad-dog bit down in the piney woods of East Texas. This was way back when Searcy was a little boy. As soon as the dog bit him, the man knew he was bound to die; so he went and got a big log chain and tied one end around the bottom of a tree and the other one to one of his legs. And right there he stayed till the sickness got him and he lost his mind. He slobbered at the mouth and moaned and screamed and ran at his wife and children, trying to catch them and bite them. Only, of course, the chain around his leg held him back, which was the reason he’d chained himself to the tree in the first place. And right there, chained to that tree, he finally died and they buried him under the same tree.
    Bud Searcy sure hoped that we wouldn’t havean outbreak of hydrophobia in Salt Licks and all die before the men got back from Kansas.
    Then he talked awhile about a panther that had caught and killed one of Joe Anson’s colts and how the Anson boys had put their dogs on the trail. They ran the panther into the cave and Jeff Anson followed in where the dogs had more sense than to go and got pretty badly panther-mauled for his trouble; but he did get the panther.
    Searcy talked till dinnertime, said not a word all through dinner, and then went back to talking as quick as he’d swallowed down the last bite.
    He told how some strange varmint that wasn’t a coyote, possum, skunk, or coon had recently started robbing the settlement blind. Or maybe it was even somebody . Nobody could tell for sure. All they knew was that they were losing meat out of their smokehouses, eggs out of their hens’ nests, and sometimes even whole pans of cornbread that the womenfolks had set out to cool. Ike Fuller had been barbecuing some meat over an open pit and left it for a minute to go get a drink of water and came back to find that a three- or four-pound chunk of beef ribs had disappearedlike it had gone up in smoke.
    Salt Licks folks were getting pretty riled about it, Searcy said, and guessed it would go hard with whatever or whoever was doing the raiding if they ever learned what it was.
    Listening to this, I got an uneasy feeling. The feeling got worse a minute later when Lisbeth motioned me to follow her off down to the spring.
    We walked clear down there, with Old Yeller and the blue-tick dog following with us, before she finally looked up at me and said, “It’s him.”
    “What do you mean?” I