The Eagles Heart | Page 5

fancies of a boy in the days of
knight errantry.
Of the Indians he held mixed opinions. At times he thought of them as
a noble race, at others--when he dreamed of fame--he wished to kill a
great many of them and be very famous. Most of the books he read
were based upon the slaughter of the "redskins," and yet at heart he
wished to be one of them and to taste the wild joy of their poetic life,
filled with hunting and warfare. Sitting Bull, Chief Gall,

Rain-in-the-Face, Spotted Tail, Star-in-the-Brow, and Black Buffalo
became wonder-working names in his mind. Every line in the
newspapers which related to the life of the cowboys or Indians he read
and remembered, for his plan was to become a part of it as soon as he
had money enough to start.
There were those who would have contributed five dollars each to send
him, for he was considered a dangerous influence among the village
boys. If a window were broken by hoodlums at night it was counted
against the minister's son. If a melon patch were raided and the fruit
scattered and broken, Harold was considered the ringleader. Of the
judgments of their elders the rough lads were well aware, and they took
pains that no word of theirs should shift blame from Harold's shoulders
to their own. By hints and sly remarks they fixed unalterably in the
minds of their fathers and mothers the conception that Harold was a
desperately bad and reckless boy. In his strength, skill, and courage
they really believed, and being afraid of him, they told stories of his
exploits, even among themselves, which bordered on the marvelous.
In reality he was not a leader of these raids. His temperament was not
of that kind. He did not care to assume direction of an expedition
because it carried too much trouble and some responsibility. His mind
was wayward and liable to shift to some other thing at any moment;
besides, mischief for its own sake did not appeal to him. The real
leaders were the two sons of the village shoemaker. They were
under-sized, weazened, shrewd, sly little scamps, and appeared not to
have the resolution of chickadees, but had a singular genius for getting
others into trouble. They knew how to handle spirits like Harold. They
dared him to do evil deeds, taunted him (as openly as they felt it safe to
do) with cowardice, and so spurred him to attempt some trifling
depredation merely as a piece of adventure. Almost invariably when
they touched him on this nerve Harold responded with a rush, and
when discovery came was nearly always among the culprits taken and
branded, for his pride would not permit him to sneak and run. So it fell
out that time after time he was found among the grape stealers or the
melon raiders, and escaped prosecution only because the men of the
town laid it to "boyish deviltry" and not to any deliberate intent to

commit a crime.
After his daughter married Mr. Excell made another effort to win the
love of his son and failed. Harold cared nothing for his father's
scholarship or oratorical powers, and never went to church after he was
sixteen, but he sometimes boasted of his father among the boys.
"If father wasn't a minister, he'd be one of the strongest men in this
town," he said once to Jack. "Look at his shoulders. His arms are hard,
too. Of course he can't show his muscle, but I tell you he can box and
swing dumb-bells."
If the father had known it, in the direction of athletics lay the road to
the son's heart, but the members of the First Church were not
sufficiently advanced to approve of a muscular minister, and so Mr.
Excell kept silent on such subjects, and swung his dumb-bells in private.
As a matter of fact, he had been a good hunter in his youth in Michigan,
and might have won his son's love by tales of the wood, but he did not.
For the most part, Harold ignored his father's occasional moments of
tenderness, and spent the larger part of his time with his sister or at the
Burns' farm.
Mr. and Mrs. Burns saw all that was manly and good in the boy, and
they stoutly defended him on all occasions.
"The boy is put upon," Mrs. Burns always argued. "A quieter, more
peaceabler boy I never knew, except my own Jack. They're good,
helpful boys, both of 'em, and I don't care what anybody says."
Jack, being slower of thought and limb, worshiped his chum, whose
alertness and resource humbled him, though he was much the better
scholar in all routine work. He read more than Harold, but Harold
seized