When I was a boy, I walked through two miles of woods to get to the schoolhouse. And I would take my father's twenty-two rifle with me and hide it in a hollow tree before I got to the schoolhouse and get it as I came home in the evening.
One evening, coming from school, I ran into a community uprising at Mr. Epperly's house. Mr. Epperly's cow had gone mad and was bawling lonesome bawls and twisting the young apple-trees out of the ground with her horns, and whole community was demanding that Mr. Epperly's dog, Old Ranger, be shot as Old Ranger had fought and killed the mad dog that bit the cow.