and he was afraid the boy might be lost there in the new surroundings of Elm City. Nelson wanted his gun, but my father said no and put it in his own overcoat pocket. I was allowed to go along with them.
When we got to the creek house, Father rapped on the door and Nelly’s mother opened it. She was a scrawny, pale-faced woman, very round-shouldered, in a calico dress. Nelly’s father wasn’t there; he had gone to take one of the teams back. There were several girls — Nelly’s sisters — strung out all the way from little kids to a big, bony creature as tall as her mother.
Father brought out the gun and said that it wasn’t wise to let little kids go carrying things like that around.
“You little devil!” said Nelly’s mother to Nelly, and she laughed when she said it. “What on earth were you doing with that?”
The girls crowded close and looked. “Why, it’s Jay’s gun!” said the eldest one.
Father wanted to know who Jay was. They laughed a lot while they were telling him, although they were remarkably close-lipped about it at the same time. All that Father could get out of them was the fact that they used to live in Oklahoma, and Jay was somebody who used to stay at their house. He had left that gun there once, and they still kept it — as a kind of memorial for Jay, it would seem.
“I swear Nelly must have taken it out of the bureau drawer,” said Mrs. Tare, still smiling. “You little devil, you got to behave yourself, you got to!” And she gave him a kind of spat with her hand, but not as if she were mad. They all seemed to think it was cute, for him to sneak off with that gun.
Father said goodbye and we went home. It was dark now, and all the way up the hill and past Mr. Boston’s farmyard, I kept wondering about this new little boy and the rusty revolver. I kept breathing hard, trying to breathe that strange oily smell out of my nose. It was the odor of their house and of themselves — the same odor I had noticed when Nelly tussled with me.
My father said quite calmly that he supposed Jay was an Oklahoma outlaw. Unintentionally, he thus gave Nelson Tare a fantastic importance in my eyes. I did not dream then that Jay, instead of old Barton Tare with his sloppy mustache, might have been Nelly’s own father. Perhaps it is a dream, even as I write the words now. But I think not.
When Nelly grew older, he possessed a great many physical virtues. He was remarkably agile in the use of his hands and arms. He had no fear of height; he would climb any windmill within reach and he could stump any boy in that end of town when it came to Stump-the-Leader. But Nelly Tare liked guns better than he did games.
At the air-rifle stage of our development, Nelly could shoot rings around any of us. He and I used to go up in our barn and lie on the moldy, abandoned hay of the old mow. There were rats that sometimes came into the chicken run next door, to eat the chickens’ food. I never did shoot a rat with my BB gun, and for some reason Nelly never did either. That was funny, because he was such a good shot. We used to amuse ourselves, while waiting for rats, by trying to peck away at the chickens’ water pan. It was a good healthy distance, and I’d usually miss. But the side of the pan which faced our way had the enamel all spotted off by Nelly’s accurate fire.
He owned an air-pump gun of his own, but not for long. He traded it to somebody for an old .22, and after that there was little peace in the neighborhood. He was always shooting at tin cans or bottles on the roadside dump. He was always hitting too.
In the winter of 1914, Nelly and I went hunting with Clyde Boston. Clyde was a huge, ruddy-faced young man at least ten years older than Nelly and I. He lived with his parents across from our corner.
One day there was deep snow, and Nelly and I were out exploring. He had his .22, and every now and then he’d bang away at a knot on a fence post. At last we wandered into Boston’s barnyard, and found Clyde in the barn, filling his pockets with shotgun shells.
He had a shotgun too — a fine repeater, gleaming blue steel — and Nelly wanted to know what Clyde was doing. “Going hunting?”
“Come on, Clyde,” I said, “let us go! Nelly’s got his gun.”
Clyde took the little rifle and examined it critically. “This won’t do for hunting around here,” he said. “I’m going out after rabbits, and you got to have a shotgun for that. Rifle bullets are apt to carry too far and hit somebody, or maybe hit a pig or something. Anyway, you couldn’t hit a cottontail on the run with that.”
“Hell I couldn’t,” said Nelly.
I said, “Clyde, you let us go with you and we’ll beat up the game. We’ll scare the rabbits out of the weeds, because you haven’t got any dog. Then you can shoot them when they run out. Maybe you’ll let us have one shot each, huh, Clyde — maybe?”
Clyde said that he would see, and he made Nelly leave his rifle at the barn. We went quartering off through the truck garden on the hillside.
The snow had fallen freshly, but already there was a mass of rabbit tracks everywhere. You could see where the cottontails had run into the thickest, weediest coverts to feed upon dry seeds.
Clyde walked in the middle, with his face apple-colored with the cold and his breath blowing out. Nelly and I spread wide, to scare up the game. We used sticks and snowballs to alarm the thickets, and we worked hard at it. The big twelve-gauge gun began to bang every once in a while. Clyde had three cottontails hanging furry from his belt before we got to the bend in the creek opposite the Catholic cemetery. Then finally he passed the gun over to me and told me I could have the next chance.
It came pretty soon. We saw a cottontail in his set — a gray little mound among the vervain stalks. I lifted the muzzle, but Clyde said that it wasn’t fair to shoot rabbits in the set, and made Nelly throw a snowball. The cottontail romped out of there in a hurry, and I whaled away with the shotgun and managed to wound the rabbit and slow him down. I fired again and missed, and Clyde caught up with the rabbit after a few strides. He put the poor peeping thing out of its misery by rapping it on the head.
I tied the rabbit to the belt of my mackinaw, and Clyde passed the shotgun over to Nelly.
Nelly’s face was pale.
“Watch your step,” said Clyde. “Remember to keep the safety on until you see something to shoot.”
“Sure,” said Nelly Tare.
We crossed the creek without starting any more rabbits, and came down the opposite side of the stream. Then a long-legged jack jumped up out of a deep furrow where there had been some fall plowing, and ran like a mule ahead of us.
“Look at those black ears!” Clyde sang out. “It’s a jack! Get him, Nelly — get him!”
Well, Nelson had the gun at his shoulder; at first I thought he had neglected to touch the safety— I thought he couldn’t pull the trigger because the safety was on. He kept swinging the muzzle of the gun, following the jackrabbit in its erratic course, until the rabbit slowed up a little.
The jack bobbed around behind a tree stump, and then came out on the other side. It squatted down on top of the snow and sat looking at us. It hopped a few feet farther and then sat up again to watch.
“For gosh sakes,” said Clyde Boston, “what’s the matter with you, kid? There he is, looking at you.”
Nelson Tare just stood like a snow man, or rather like a snow boy. He kept the rabbit covered; his dirty blue finger didn’t move. The trigger waited, the shell in the barrel waited, and so did we.
Nelly’s face was deathly white under the dirt that streaked it. The eyes were blank little marbles, as always; even his nose seemed pointed like the sights of a gun. And yet he did not shoot.
Clyde said, half under his breath, “I guess that’s what they call buck fever. You got the buck, Nelly.” He hurried over to take the shotgun.
Blood from the last-killed rabbit made little dots on the snow around my feet, though the animal was freezing fast.
“Can’t you see him, Nelly?”
Nelson said, “Yes. I —”
Clyde lost all patience. “Oh, for gosh sake!” he exclaimed, and grabbed the gun. But our combined motions startled the jackrabbit, and he vanished into the creek gorge beyond.
Something had happened there in the snow; none of us knew exactly what had happened. But whatever it was, it took the edge off our sport. We tramped along a cattle path next to the stream, with Clyde carrying the shotgun. We boys didn’t scare up any more game. Nelly kept looking at the rabbits, which bounced and rubbed their frozen red against Clyde Boston’s overalls.
Clyde teased him, all the way back to the Boston barnyard. He’d say, “Nelly, I thought you were supposed to be the Daniel Boone of the neighborhood. Gosh, Nelly, I thought you could shoot. I thought you were just gun
