“Say, quit that melancholy subject, won’t you?” demanded Bumpus. “I don’t like to be reminded of my wicked past, because I’ve turned over a new leaf since I joined the scouts. Why, you couldn’t tempt me now with the biggest grandfather watermelon ever grown. B-r-r! It makes me shake, just to remember some things that happened in those old days, when I went with Giraffe, and Davy Jones, and the rest of that lark-loving crowd.”
Half an hour afterwards Thad and Step Hen started out, guns in hand. Knowing that the patrol leader was perfectly at home in the woods, no one bothered about giving them advice; or predicting all manner of direful calamities ahead. Let it snow and blow as it pleased, Thad was enough of a woodsman to know how to make himself comfortable, and get back to the camp on the lake shore in due season.
Of course Bumpus had been more or less disappointed because he did not have an early chance to prove the merits of his new gun, since he had been taking private lessons from one of the guides in the way of handling firearms. But Thad had promised that the fat boy and Giraffe should have the next chance for a hunt; they were canoemates, and seemed often thrown together, perhaps because they represented the “fat and the lean of it,” and as Bumpus was fond of saying, “extremes meet.”
Half an hour later, and the two young Nimrods had managed to get a couple of miles from the camp. But as yet they had not sighted that wonderful six-pronged buck which Step Hen was to lay low. They walked along about fifty feet apart, Thad generously allowing his companion to be a little in advance of him. This he did really because he wished Step Hen to have the advantage of the first shot; being confident that if the other failed to bring down the game he would still have some show before the deer could vanish from sight.
Then again, it was just as well to have Step Hen in front. He was inclined to be nervous; and some sudden whirr of wings, as a partridge flew out of a nearby thicket, might cause his finger to press on the trigger of his gun a little harder than he intended. Thad believed in being on the safe side, every time.
Step Hen carried a lovely little repeating rifle of the thirty-thirty type; and his ammunition was of the soft-nosed kind, which, as it “mushrooms” on striking, is just as serviceable as a ball three times as large; while Thad had his double-barrel Marlin shotgun, a twelve bore, with buckshot shells meant for big game.
As they were passing through what seemed to be a tangle such as is seldom met with in the pine woods of Maine, where they had to dodge trailing vines, Step Hen, in trying to avoid one that threatened to catch him by the neck, managed to stumble over a log, and go sprawling forward, his gun flying from his grip, but fortunately not going off. But immediately Step Hen commenced to thresh around, as he shouted out:
“Thad! Oh! Thad, hurry up, and help me out of this! My legs are twisted in the vine; and something bit me! I know it must a been a rattlesnake, and I’m a goner!”