Ch. 7: The Deer Stealers - Page 2

snatched it up in her arms, and
holding it clasped to her bosom, began lavishing caresses and endearing
expressions on it, tears of rapture in her eyes! Not one word of inquiry
or bitter, jealous reproach--all that part of her was swallowed up and
annihilated in the joy of a woman who had been denied a child of her own
to love and nourish and worship. And now one had come to her and it
mattered little how. Two or three days later the infant was baptized at
the village church with the quaint name of Moses Found.

Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laughable name. It was
to his mind a singularly appropriate one; he assured me it was not the
only case he knew of in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a
child of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of the
Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and worked and saved and
eventually become quite a prosperous and important person. There was
really nothing funny in it.

The story of Moses Found had been told him by his old mother; she, he
remarked significantly, had good cause to remember it. She was herself a
native of the village, born two or three years later than the mysterious
Moses; her father, John Barter by name was a carpenter and lived in an
old, thatched house which still exists and is very familiar to me. He
had five sons; then, after an interval of some years, a daughter was
born, who in due time was to be Isaac's wife. When she was a little girl
her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of manhood, and Moses,
too, was a young man--"the spit of his father" people said, meaning the
head-keeper--and he was now one of Harbutt's under-keepers.

About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the village, not
satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer broke out and roamed over
the downs, took to poaching them in the woods. One night, a hunt having
been arranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted himself close
to the keeper's house, and having watched the keepers go in and the
lights put out, he actually succeeded in fastening up the doors from the
outside with screws and pieces of wood without creating an alarm. He
then met his confederates at an agreed spot and the hunting began,
during which one deer was chased to the house and actually pulled down
and killed on the lawn.

Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excitement; the
under-keepers feared that a force it would be dangerous to oppose had
taken possession of the woods, while Harbutt raved and roared like a
maddened wild beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull
the doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out, gun in hand,
and calling the others to follow rushed into the wood. But he was