I do not know certainly about the spoonful of rum.

If Tibbetts gave him the rum, Halstead kept quiet about it; the old Squire was a strict observer of the Maine law.
None of us found out what Halstead was doing for four or five days, and then only by accident.

For he had caught his speckled gobbler and put him down at the foot of the stairs in the wagon-house cellar; and he got a sheet of hemlock bark, four feet long by two or three feet wide, such as are peeled off hemlock logs, and sold at tanneries, for the turkey to stand on.
It was dark as Egypt down in that cellar, when the door at the head of the stairs was shut; and turkeys, as is well-known, are very timid about moving in the dark.

That poor gobbler just stood there, stock-still, on that sheet of bark and did not dare step off it.

Three times a day Halstead used to go down there, on the sly, with a lantern, and feed him.
This went on for some time; Addison and I learned of it from hearing a little faint gobble in the cellar one morning when the flock was out in the farm lane, just behind the wagon-house.