Page:The lady or the tiger and other stories, Stockton (Scribner's 1897 ed).djvu/88

78 be fust-rate corn-land. Why, I tell ye, sir, down here on Colt's Creek there's a beaver-dam a quarter uv a mile long, an' the water's backed up all over every thing. Aint that enough to give a whole county the chills? An' it does it too. Ef the people'd all go and sit on that there dam, they'd shake it down. I tell ye, sir, the war give us, in this country, a good many things we didn't want, and among 'em's chills. Before the war, nobody never heard of sich things as chills round about hyar. 'Taint on'y the beavers, nuther. When ye can't afford to hire more'n three or four niggers to work a big farm, 'taint likely ye kin do no ditchin', and all the branches and the ditches in the bottom-lands fills up, an' a feller's best corn-fields is pretty much all swamp, and his family has to live on quinine."

"I should think it would pay well to hunt and trap these beavers," I remarked.

"Well, so it does, sometimes," said Martin; "but half the people aint got no time. Now it's different with me, because I'm not a-farmin'. An' then it aint everybody that kin git 'em. It takes a kind o' eddication to hunt beaver. But you was a-askin' about 'coons."

"Yes," I said. "I'd like to go 'coon-hunting."

"There's lots o' fun in it," said he, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and putting up his cowhide boots on the top of the porch-railing in front of him.

"About two or three years afore the war, I went out on a 'coon-hunt, which was the liveliest hunt I ever see in all my life. I never had sich a good hunt