“Now, I want to know how and why that shanty caught fire?” Will ejaculated.
By this time the hunters had reached the spot lately occupied by their cabin, and they now stood around the pile of still smoking ruins, with probably “mingled emotions.”
“You cooked the few morsels we had for breakfast, Will; therefore you ought to be responsible for this,” Henry observed.
“O—h!” groaned Will, “so I am! I didn’t put the fire entirely out this morning, and I forgot a box of matches on the hearth—the homemade hearth. They have met!”
“At first I grieved that our hovel was so small,” said Charles; “but now I’m glad it was, or else the fire might have gone into the forest.”
“And burnt us alive!” Steve said, with a shudder. Then he left Marmaduke, bent over the sufferer on the litter, and whispered in his ear: “Will, as soon as ever we reach home, I intend to deliver you over to Mr. B. F. Stolz!”
Having discharged this horrible threat, Steve returned to Marmaduke, muttering: “A hunter has no business to build a shanty to live in; he ought to pitch a tent, if it’s nothing but a parasol on a fish-pole.”
“What about this fellow’s bumps?” chuckles the reader.
It is very ungracious in the reader, after all our kindness towards him, to throw out such insinuations, and we refuse to give him any other explanation or satisfaction than this: Will’s bumps were not so prominent as usual that day.