I told them about the quantity of wild strawberries I had out in
Vandemark's Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and
his wife and herself might go out there with me for a
strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it incumbent upon him
to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the
sugar if I would pony up the cream--of which I had a plenty. So we had
quite a banquet out on the farm. Once in a while I would forget about
the assaults and the treason and be quite jolly--and then it would all
come back upon me, and I would break out in a cold sweat. Out of this
grew the first strawberry and cream festival ever held in any church in
Monterey Centre, the fruit being furnished, according to the next issue
of the _Journal_ "by the malefactors confined in the county
Bastille"--in other words by me.
4
Virginia and I gathered the berries, and she was as happy as she could
be, apparently; but once in a while she would say, "Poor Teunis! Can't a
Dutchman see a joke?"
After that, the elder and his wife used to come out to see me, bringing
Virginia with them, almost every week, and I prided myself greatly on my
fried chicken my nice salt-rising bread, my garden vegetables, my green
corn, my butter, milk and cream. I had about forgotten about being
arrested, when the grand jury indicted me, and Amos Bemisdarfer and
Flavius Bohn went bail for me. When the trial came on I was fined twenty
dollars, and before I could produce the money, it was paid by William
Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost, who told me that they got
me into it, and it wasn't fair for a boy to suffer through doing what
was necessary for the protection of the settlers, and what a lot of
older men had egged him on to do.
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