“It won’t do—it won’t do.”
“What won’t do? Do you mean to go out there and pick up your rifle?”
“Yes, that is what I mean.”
“What is to hinder?”
“I don’t like the looks of that flat-boat.”
“Whew!” blew the hunter, surveying the object in question as though he had never seen it before.
“Why you don’t like it?”
“I am afraid there are Indians concealed upon the boat. I saw them there last night.”
And now arose a dispute in which all three of the whites engaged. The hunter, most certainly was the best qualified to judge, expressed it as his firm conviction, that half a dozen Indians at least were at that moment glaring out from the flat-boat, and waiting for their reappearance. Teddy persistently maintained that there was but one savage upon the raft, and that he lay in the cabin sound asleep! He could give no satisfactory reasons to the others for this belief, but he appeared sincerely to believe it himself.
Like all excited debaters, the longer they argued, they more strenuously did each affirm his belief in what he first stated. How long the dispute would have lasted, it is impossible to tell, had not the Irishman proposed to decide it at once.