“Sometimes I does, and sometimes I doesn’t.”
I ceased my questions for a few moments, for fear of provoking him. As his route, as far as it extended, would be in our direction, I determined to keep his company if I could gain his consent. He was a splendid specimen of the physical man. He was rather short, but heavy and thick-set, with a compactness of frame that showed a terrible strength slumbering in his muscles. His face was broad, covered by a thin, straggling beard of grizzled gray, and several ridged scars were visible in different parts of it. His brows were beetling and lowering, and beneath them a couple of black eyes fairly snapt at times with electric fire. His mouth was broad, and though one could plainly see a whirlwind of terrific passion might be called into life within his breast, yet there was, also in his face, the index of a heart alive to good humor and frankness. I saw that, if approached skillfully, his heart could be reached. He was evidently the creature of odd whims and fancies and caprice, feeling as well satisfied without the society of his fellow-man as with it—one of those strange beings, a hero of a hundred perils, who was satisfied to lose his life in the mighty wilderness of the Far West, without a single one suspecting or caring for his fate.
“Would you have any objections to my friend and myself accompanying you, that is, as far as you should proceed in our direction?”
He looked steadily at me a moment, and answered, “You kin go with me ef you wants; but I knows as how you’re green, and yer needn’t s’pose I’m goin’ to hold in fur yer. Yers as never does that thing.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t expect you to. Of course, we will make it a point not to interfere in the least with your plans and movements.”
“Whar is yer other chap? S’pose it war him what come peakin’ through yer a while ago; had a notion of spilin’ his picter fur his imperdence.”
“I will go bring him,” I answered, rising and moving off. But as I stepped across the stream, I discerned the top of Nat’s white hat, just above a small box-elder; and moving on, saw his eye fixed with an eager stare upon the trapper.
“Don’t he look savage?” he whispered, as I came to him.
“Not very. Are you afraid of him?”