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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LUKE MONTGOMERY, the rector's son, was my earliest playmate. My memory of him is very vivid, though I was barely six years old when his father went to New England to take charge of a mill town parish, and my chum was lost to me forever. But the early years are vast stretches of time, and my companionship with Luke seemed to me to have existed through a lifetime?which, when strait- ly considered, it had. I was younger than my playmate by about six months, and his inferior in strength, self-assertiveness and imaginative mendacity. He was a liar of the most delightful type; his fictions belonged to the realm of art and it was unfair to discuss them in terms of ethics. It was his habit to arise in the night and kill marauding housebreakers, concealing their bodies to avoid subsequent trouble and discussion. These justifiable homicides he compassed by means of a small and very dull hatchet?a poor thing, but his own. He excavated the graves with the same convenient weapon. When Mott Epperson's barn collapsed, killing a horse and a cow and smashing a new buggy, the public adhered to the theory that the accident was caused by defective tie-beams. But Luke confided to me the truefacts of the case. Mott Epperson and he had been enemies for years; Luke had avenged himself for certain injuries on the previous night by going over and chopping Mott's barn down with a few well-directed blows of his hatchet. A certain historic heroism attaches to deeds done with a hatchet; confused precedents relating to George Washington and Jack-and-the-Bean- stalk doubtless endowed Luke's devastating tomahawk with an adventitious virtue. In these feats of prowess and in a rough and tumble fight, Luke was my master. He affected a contempt for the departments in which I excelled. At the age ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217470193 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 021747019X |
| Weight | 0.63 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.43 In |
| List Price | $19.99 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 188 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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