"No, Kroof, you shan't have any more at all, unless you are good!" she admonished, with hortatory finger uplifted.
There are few animals so quick to take a hint as the bear, and Kroof's wits had grown peculiarly alert during her long intimacy with Miranda. She submitted with instant meekness, and waited, with tongue hanging out, while Miranda prepared her a huge bowl of bread and molasses. When she had eaten this, she investigated everything about the cabin, and finally went to sleep on a mat in the corner of the inner room. Before sundown she got up and wandered off to her lair, being still drowsy with winter sleep.
After this the old bear came daily at noon to the cabin, dined with Kirstie and Miranda, and dozed away the afternoon on her mat in the chosen corner. Kirstie came to regard her as a member of the household. To the cattle and the poultry she paid no attention whatever. In a few days the oxen ceased to lower their horns as she passed; and the cock, Saunders's equally haughty successor, refrained from the shrill expletives of warning with which he had been wont to herald her approach.
One afternoon, before spring had fairly set in, there came two unwelcome visitors to the cabin. In a lumber-camp some fifteen miles away, on a branch of the Quah-Davic, there had been trouble. Two of the "hands," surly and mutinous all winter, had at last, by some special brutality, enraged the "boss" and their mates beyond all pardon. Hooted and beaten from the camp, they had started through the woods by the shortest road to the Settlement. Their hearts were black with pent-up fury. About three o'clock in the afternoon, they happened upon the clearing, and demanded something to eat.
Though sullen, and with a kind of menace in their air, their words were civil enough at first, and Kirstie busied herself to supply what seemed to her their just demands. The laws of hospitality are very binding in the backwoods. Miranda, meanwhile, not liking the looks of the strangers, kept silently aloof and scrutinized them.
When Kirstie had set before them a good meal,--hot tea, and hot boiled beans, and eggs, and white bread and butter,--they were disappointed because she gave them no pork, and they were not slow to demand it.
