The dogs
are chained up in the smoke-house, and bad people are often coming here;
I will go turn the dogs loose."
"Be dogged if you do!" Jimmy reflected. "That's the meanest cat-bird
ever I see, fur now it's shut up a-purpose."
There sounded something familiar to the uninvited guest in the voice
which seemed to delay this intention; but the cat-bird, with his
unaccommodating mood, broke right in again. Then the female continued:
"While the men--who had come armed, expecting trouble--were removing
Aunt Betty's goods out of the room, throwing many of them out of the
windows, so as to be themselves in sole possession, a sound was heard in
the room below, where your meal is now ready, like a panther skipping
and lashing his tail; and, before the men could breathe, old Ebenezer
Johnson was up the stairs and laying about him. His eyes were full of
murder. One man jumped right through that window and rolled off the
porch; another he pitched down the stairs; the third was a boy, Joe
King, barely grown--he lives not far from this house now--and Ebenezer
Johnson dashed him down the stairs, too, and started after him. All his
life the boy had been taught to dread that terrible man, and now he was
in his hands, or flying before him; and, as he reeled through the room
below, out of the door that opens on the back porch, the boy's eyes, in
the agony of the fear of death, beheld a rifle leaning there.
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