Based on this plan of work and life I have
written ten books, and `please God I live so long,' I shall write
ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern
Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods
legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men
and women I have known."
Chapter 1
THE RAT-CATCHERS OF THE WABASH
"Hey, you swate-scented little heart-warmer!" cried Jimmy Malone,
as he lifted his tenth trap, weighted with a struggling muskrat,
from the Wabash. "Varmint you may be to all the rist of creation,
but you mane a night at Casey's to me."
Jimmy whistled softly as he reset the trap. For the moment he
forgot that he was five miles from home, that it was a mile farther
to the end of his line at the lower curve of Horseshoe Bend, that
his feet and fingers were almost freezing, and that every rat of
the ten now in the bag on his back had made him thirstier. He
shivered as the cold wind sweeping the curves of the river struck
him; but when an unusually heavy gust dropped the ice and snow from
a branch above him on the back of his head, he laughed, as he ducked
and cried: "Kape your snowballing till the Fourth of July, will you!"
"Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!" remarked a tiny gray bird on the tree above
him. Jimmy glanced up. "Chickie, Chickie, Chickie," he said. "I
can't till by your dress whether you are a hin or a rooster. But I
can till by your employmint that you are working for grub.
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