A neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the
bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open
ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never
thought of it again. We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for
us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub. The ancient
stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face. Finally it
occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out
and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of
water. Then he returned to his tub.
I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was
about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and
disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind. Fragments of it fell in the
streets full two hundred yards away. Nearly a third of the shed roof
over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a
small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us
and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond. I was as white as
a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless. But the Indian betrayed
no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort. He simply stopped
washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment,
and then remarked:
"Mph! Dam stove heap gone!"--and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if
it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do.
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