“Huh! don’t see how you make that out,” grumbled Giraffe. “This here gun is one of the hardest hitters ever made. It is some hefty, I admit; and in a long jaunt you’d come off much better than me, Step Hen. But what harm could your little pea-shooter do against a big black bear, or a savage moose, not to speak of a panther, or a wolf?”
“Looky here, and I’ll show you, old scoffer,” replied Step Hen. “Just take note of the cartridge that goes in the magazine of my rifle. Do you see how extra long it is, and how the powder chamber swells much larger than the end that holds the bullet? Well, the power is all there. But that ain’t all, not by a long sight.”
“Go on!” said Giraffe, fretfully, as the other paused, dramatically.
“Well, this is what they call a soft-nosed bullet. They’ve tried to prevent the use of them in war, because they are so terrible in their results. When it strikes even the flesh of a deer, it mushrooms out till it makes a larger hole even than your big bore. Yes, and if you asked Eli there, he’d be likely to tell you that if he had to choose between the two, he’d much prefer being hit by a bullet from your old elephant gun, to one from my pea-shooter, as you call it. That’s all.”
Giraffe listened, and frowned. He may have tried to look as though he did not believe half he heard; but apparently he had lost considerable interest in his own heavy artillery, for he was seen to quietly lay it down immediately afterwards.
“And Sebattis has promised to show me how he makes what he calls a ‘moose-call’,” remarked Bumpus, proudly; “being a strip of birch bark, curled up in a peculiar way like a long cornucopia; and through this the hunter can coax an old bull to come near enough to give him a shot. P’raps now, he’ll even let us hear what it sounds like.”
“Bully!” exclaimed Davy Jones; “I’ve always wanted to know what that could be like, when I’ve read about men calling the moose. Does he come to have a fight, Eli?”
“I guess that’s jest what he does,” replied the older guide, who was smoking his pipe contentedly by the fire, all duties for the day having been closed up.
“Then that must have been why Sebattis stripped that bark from the birch tree after we landed this afternoon,” remarked Step Hen. “I wondered whether he meant to write on it, the way you told us the Indians did, Allan; making pictures where white men would have letters, and drawing the story out. There he goes now, starting to make the horn, I guess.”
“This is mighty pleasant up here, fellows,” said Thad, as he glanced around; “all of you look perfectly happy, as though not a single care rested on your minds.”