The hermit of Turkey Hollow Author:Arthur Cheney Train Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: by Squire Mason's crass materialism. Stealthily —so as not to frighten the hermit—he crept towards the open door of the shanty. . ,: . It was Charlie Emerson—... more »the man sitting under the boulder with his ax across his knees—who heard the shot that killed the hermit. He was not a native of Pottsville, although he usually could be found there every spring, working over at Sampson's steam lumber mill at the lower end of Turtle Pond. This particular Saturday he had got the afternoon off to fill an order for pea sticks which he purposed cutting from the birches which grew thick in the less swampy part of Turkey Hollow, and he was right in the middle of it when the thunderstorm came up and he had to stop for awhile until the sun should dry the bushes off. He saw Skinny cruising through the underbrush and was puzzled by the fact that the tramp ignored his salutation. But he had gone on smoking and, after taking a short nap, had resumed his work on the pea sticks. Then, as the sun had begun to slant through the tree trunks and the shadow of the hillto come creeping across the marsh, the hot silence of the afternoon had been shattered first by a cry for help and then by a shot—both from the hermit's shanty less than two hundred yards away. Ax in hand he made the distance through the thickets in less than three minutes, and as he broke cover into the clearing behind the house he saw the undergrowth moving on the other side and heard the snapping of twigs. It was so still that he could hear the drone of a bee in the fringe of meadow-sweet down by the well, and—coupled with the cry—it gave him a weird creepy feeling such as he never knew before. But he took a good grip on himself, walked round the shanty, and looked in through the open door. Everything was as usual—the clock, the cot...« less