Bushy a romance founded on fact
“Her father told her this very morning,” said Rover to himself, “that
she should be careful. She will step in a hole in a minute and then
she will be drowned.” He ran first up the bank then down to the very
water’s edge, then back toward the house, looking to see if he could
not call some one to make Bushy mind; then he would squat on his hind
legs and howl and yelp at every step she made.
“Hush up!” cried Bushy, who thought he was crying only because she had
forbidden him coming in. “Hush up! people don’t cry on Bunker Hill Day.
When the parade comes home we will--oh, oh, oh!” she screamed stooping
down to try and pull out something that had stuck into her foot. Her
back was to Rover. He saw her stoop and heard her scream with pain.
That was enough for him. With one bound he landed in the water close
beside her and with another he had clinched his teeth in the back of
her dress and then commenced a backward movement that threw Bushy quite
off her feet and down flat in the black muddy water.
The skirt worked down from her head. Rover pulled and pulled, her
head ploughing a furrow in the mud as he dragged her along. The water
almost choked her. She could not cry out, and did not realize what had
happened to her until she found herself high and safe on the bank, with
Rover dancing as if he were crazy about her.
She was dripping wet; her hair was plastered down over her face by the
mud; her dress, once so pink and beautiful, was black with dirt. As
soon as she could get her breath she threw herself down on the ground
and cried with all her might.
“Oh, Rover, Rover! You have broken my heart. You stupid dog! It isn’t
deep. I was only wading in just for fun, and now you have spoilt my”----
“Great heavens! Bushy, what has happened?” cried Shanks, who had been
sent to the cabin for a chisel. “How did you fall in, and how did you
get out?” he cried, quite out of breath from running.
He wiped the mud from her face, and again asked: “Tell me, Bushy,
did you fall to the bottom?”
“Bottom of what?” inquired Bushy, looking curiously at him through her
tangled hair. “I was only wading.”
“Then you didn’t fall into the prospect hole that has twelve feet of
water in it, just there?” and Shanks pointed about two feet from the
spot where Bushy’s toe had struck against a board, and from which Rover
had dragged her.
“Rover saved me!” she cried, throwing her arms about his wet body.
“Dear old Rover kept me from falling into that dreadful hole. I forgot
it was there; one step more and I would have gone down. Oh, Rover, dear
Rover, I won’t call you stupid ever in my life again; and who cares for
the pink dress now!”
Rover wagged his tail with joy until Bushy stood up; then she presented
such a funny appearance that he began to howl louder than ever. This
made Shanks and Bushy laugh heartily.
Shanks took them to the cabin and gave them both a bath, but Bushy’s
hair had to be shingled; her father could not get the snarls out any
other way. The pink dress was spoiled, but Bushy had it put carefully
away in a box, where she found it years and years afterward, when it
brought back the story of faithful old Rover and how he saved her life.
CHAPTER VII
“Padre, now my hair is short, I’m going to play boy,” said Bushy a
month after Rover had pulled her from the pond. “Do all the boys feel
light-headed like I do?”
“That is a puzzler,” answered her father, as he turned her buckskin
jacket right side out and helped her put it on. “I think you will have
to wait until you know some boys and ask them.”
It was morning and Bushy had been awakened to accompany Mr. Sukolt and
three men, way up the mountains, over the divide and into a section
where the pine-trees grew tall and without many branches. These trees
Mr. Sukolt used for timbering the mine. They were cut into lengths to
support places where there was danger of the walls caving in.
“No, no. I don’t want my dress. I want to wear pants like you. Tom
must make me a pair,” cried Bushy. “I’m a little boy. Don’t you want a
little boy, Padre?”
“Why, I rather think I do if he has this little wildcat’s face,”
replied the father, again trying to help Bushy dress.
“No, no,” she again protested. “Tom, can’t you make me a pair of pants?”
“Of course, I can,” he replied, laughing at the idea of Bushy being a
boy. “Just watch me. Mr. Sukolt, you go and attend to the horses. Bless
my heart! The child ought to have a summer outfit, and it shall be
pants if she wants them, sure as my name’s Tom Cole.”
“Oh, Tom, make me into a little cow-boy. Can I have a whip and--oh,
I’ll wear my nightgown for a white waist, and put the buckskin jacket
over it, and--what can we make pants out of, Tom?”
“Why, this skirt will do. I’ll just turn it into two little skirts
instead of one. Ha, ha! look at that! They are almost done already,”
cried Tom, as he sewed away with twine and harness needle.
Tom soon turned the coffee-sack dress into a beautiful pair of pants.
He handed them over to Bushy with the greatest pride.
“Oh, they are scrumptious!” she cried, disappearing, and in a minute
came bounding back with a boy’s suit on complete.
“Something is wrong with the waist; guess we can scrape up a sash,”
said Tom, eying her critically. He went to the clothes-box and pulled
out a roll of red flannel cut in strips for bandages. “Look here,” he
said, unrolling it. “How is this for a sash?”
Bushy screamed with joy. “Oh, Tom, I’ll be so careful of it if you let
me wear it just this one day.” Without waiting for an answer she wound
the strip three times around her tiny waist, then tied it in a big
flowing bow. Next her quick fingers twisted it like a ribbon about the
crown of her wide felt hat. “Now, Tom, I am sure enough a little boy!”
Then, taking up the rawhide whip, which she called a “quirt,” she began
to dance a hornpipe, cracking her whip in time.
“Hello!” called her father. “What have we here? Some gypsy strayed from
the camp? I’ll help you out.” He picked up an old guitar that stood in
one corner, and then to a real jig tune, Bushy danced all the steps the
miners had taught her.
So they started for the woods. Walt drove the team. Tom and Shanks,
mounted on ponies, started ahead, and Bushy and her father brought up
the rear, Mr. Sukolt on an Indian pony, and Bushy, as usual, on Ned.
They descended through caverns where icicles still dripped, and where
there was danger of some avalanche sliding down to bury itself in the
black gorge below. Soon they came to a place where the melted snow and
ice was plunging madly through the rocks and black dirt.
“Ah, we can use that torrent,” said Mr. Sukolt, calling a halt just
before entering the road that would lead off to the right. “We will cut
logs and get them down the hillside by putting them in that stream.”
The men in less than half an hour were chopping, hallooing, calling,
singing, laughing, and working with all their might.
“I fear the creek is rising,” exclaimed Mr. Sukolt all at once. “There
must have been a cloud-burst along its course somewhere. To your
saddles, boys; we must run no risk; there is every indication of a
freshet.”
Bushy heard the anxious voice and there was no need to tell her what
to do. She was on Ned in a second, and with the long lariat coiled she
rode up to her father’s side and said: “I am ready, Padre, shall we
make for the valley or go up the mountain.”
“To the valley, every one to the valley! There is no hope of escaping
it. Ah! how it roars; we must get ready to swim.”
Tom unhitched the mules from the wagon and fixed their harness; then,
mounting his pony, called to the men to follow. Shanks and Walt were
coming down as fast as they could.
“If the water strikes you, Bushy, hold on fast to Ned. I would tie you
to me, but if I go under I don’t want you to be tied to me, and if I
get out safe I can help you.”
“Is that thunder, Padre?” asked Bushy, looking up into her father’s
pale face. He only urged his horse and Ned to go faster. “Make for the
flat,” he called to the men, “then turn the horses’ heads toward Bald
Mountain.”
He had no more than finished speaking when the “thunder” broke into one
great report and water came down the gulch seven feet high. The men
were not afraid of the water, it was the timber that they had spent all
day in cutting that they thought would perhaps dash down and kill them
and the horses.
Bushy and her father were on the outer edge of the freshet, and when it
struck, both horses lost their feet and went under.
“Lie close and cling tight,” cried Mr. Sukolt, just as he, too, went
out of sight. A great log that Tom had taken such pride in cutting
down followed end over end, and as Mr. Sukolt and the pony came up and
were straightening out for a swim, the log struck on the pony’s head,
stunning him so that he sank like lead.
Busby and Ned were making for the dry land, only the current was so
strong it swept Ned sideways. Bushy was dripping wet, for she had gone
under, too.
“Padre,” she screamed, when she saw him sinking, “swim to Ned. Oh, Ned,
we must help Padre.”
Ned seemed to understand, because he neighed when he looked back and
saw Mr. Sukolt trying to swim toward them. Then he turned his head
to Bushy, making a funny sound, as if he were waiting for her to do
something.
“Oh, I see,” cried Bushy, “the lariat! Oh, Ned, I have no head like
you.” Whether Ned did mean that or not, Bushy always insists he did.
She threw the rope so her father got hold, and when Bushy was once on
dry land she pulled him out, too. Then he threw it to the other men,
who were floundering about like fish. The pony was drowned and Walt got
his leg broken. Rover was not in the water at all. He seemed to have
the instinct to run in the right direction. The wagon was swept down
stream a short distance and landed unharmed on a slight elevation in
the valley.
Bushy gave Ned an extra big supper that night because he was the lucky
one to help pull them all out. Walt was the only one who had a hard
time in getting home.
“I think much depended upon Bushy’s pants,” said her father that night,
after they reached the camp again. “I don’t believe any little girl
could have accomplished what our little boy did to-day.”
Bushy’s greatest sorrow seemed to be that the red flannel that she so
faithfully promised Tom she would be careful of was all shrivelled up.
CHAPTER VIII
“Padre, I am going out to try and catch a prairie-dog to-day!” called
out Bushy to her father one bright Fall morning just after he had
started for the mine. “Billy is lonesome, and I want to find another to
play with him.”
Billy was a prairie-dog that Bushy had drowned out of his home over six
months before. He had become so tame that she could let him loose and
he would never go far from the shanty. He had red-brown hair on his
back, and his little feet and under parts were white. Although he was a
tiny baby prairie-dog when she drowned him out, he had grown almost a
foot long, and his cheek pouches were half an inch thick, and his body
round and clumsy. Perhaps you don’t know how they live. They burrow in
the ground and at the entrance to their holes throw up a mound that
looks very much like an ant-hill. The hole in the centre, or door, I
suppose the dogs call it, slopes down and finally divides into long
passages and hallways. The main hall is sometimes very long, and off
from it run these short burrows that end in a soft bed of dry grass
and leaves.
One day Bushy coaxed Tom to help her carry water to Dogtown, as the