Always fond of hunting, anxious now to drown pain and forebodings in some excitement, Morton did not need a second suggestion from his mother. He feared bad results from Kike's temper; and though he had little hope of any relenting on Lumsden's part, he had an eager desire to forget his trouble in a chase after bears and deer. He seized his cap, saddled and mounted Dolly, and started at once to the house of Kike's mother. Soon after Morton went, his father woke up, and, finding his son gone out, complained, as he got ready for bed, that the boy would "ketch the fever, certain, runnin' 'round that away at night."
THE IRISH SCHOOL-MASTER.
Morton found Kike in a state of exhaustion—pale, angry, and sick. Mr. Brady, the Irish school-master, from whom the boys had received most of their education and many a sound whipping, was doing his best to divert Kike from his revengeful mood. It is a singular fact in the history of the West, that so large a proportion of the first school-masters were Irishmen of uncertain history.
"Ha! Moirton, is it you?" said Brady. "I'm roight glad to see ye. Here's this b'y says hay'd a shot his own uncle as shore as hay'd a toiched him with his roidin'-fwhip. An' I've been a-axin ov him fwoi hay hain't blowed out me brains a dozen times, sayin' oive lathered him with baich switches. I didn't guiss fwat a saltpayter kag hay wuz, sure. Else I'd a had him sarched for foire-arms before iver I'd a venter'd to inform him which end of the alphabet was the bayginnin'. Hay moight a busted me impty pate for tellin' him that A wusn't B."
It was impossible for Morton to keep from smiling at the good old fellow's banter. Brady was bent on mollifying Kike, who was one of his brightest and most troublesome pupils, standing next to Patty and Morton in scholarship though much younger.
Kike's mother, a shrewd but illiterate woman, was much troubled to see him in so dangerous a passion. "I wish he was leetle-er, ur bigger," she said.
"An' fwoi air ye afther wishing that same, me dair madam?" asked the Irishman.
"Bekase," said the widow, "ef he was leetle-er, I could whip it outen him; ef he was bigger, he wouldn't be sich a fool. Boys is allers powerful troublesome when they're kinder 'twixt and 'tween—nary man nor boy. They air boys, but they feel so much bigger'n they used to be, that they think theirselves men, and talk about shootin', and all sich like. Deliver me from a boy jest a leetle too big to be laid acrost your lap, and larnt what's what. Tho', ef I do say it, Kike's been a oncommon good sort of boy to me mostly, on'y he's got a oncommon lot of red pepper into him, like his pappy afore him, and he's one of them you can't turn. An', as for Enoch Lumsden, I would be glad ef he wuz shot, on'y I don't want no little fool like Kike to go to fightin' a man like Nuck Lumsden. Nobody but God A'mighty kin ever do jestice to his case; an' it's a blessed comfort to me that I'll meet him at the Jedgment-day. Nothin' does my heart so much good, like, as to think what a bill Nuck'll have to settle then, and how he can't browbeat the Jedge, nor shake a mortgage in his face. It's the on'y rale nice thing about the Day of Jedgment, akordin' to my thinkin'. I mean to call his attention to some things then. He won't say much about his wife's belongin' to fust families thar, I 'low."