From that hour I was Kchee-Bo-o-in or Grand Pow-wow to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I believe in myself when such mad “spells” come over me. One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and sunshiny, and we were paddling along when we saw a “summer
duck” swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting in the bow exactly between me and the duck. “Fire at it with your revolver!” cried Sam.
“It is too far away,” I replied, “and you are right in the way.”
Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William Tell’s at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a feather.
“I knew you’d hit!” cried Sam triumphantly. And so I had, but I should not like to try that shot again.
Reflex action of the brain and secondary automatism! It must be so—Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the “old Injun” and my High-Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the least self-deception or delusion.
It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over so easily, men will pass over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pass over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of canoe was raised.
Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about manna in the wilderness! money in the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill
of delight. One day, stopping at a logger’s camp, I gave a decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, “Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o’ delicacy with us.”
Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to live. One day we came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county court for amusement. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of which the poorest English peasant knows something, yet every one of these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty.