“No I didn’t, either,” continued Little Rifle, parrying the taunts of the grim old hunter, who always delighted in quizzing him. “I took it away from a red-skin that was wide awake as you are.”
“Oh, that’s it; I s’pose he’d been eating green persimmon or tough babies, that give him the chollywobbles so as to double him up with pain, and make him not care whether you took his gun, or his head. Why didn’t you bring his scalp? ’Cause he wouldn’t let you, I s’pose. Let me take a look at the gun and see whether it’s good for any thing.”
After turning it over very deliberately in his hands for several minutes, trying the lock and seeing that it was loaded, he pronounced it a “tollyble weapon.” And then, throwing aside his jesting words, he asked Little Rifle to give him the particulars of his encounter with the red-skin, and listened with great attention until he had finished.
“You behaved like a hero,” was the comment of old Robsart, when he had finished, “and I think have fairly ’arned your supper. Ef you keep on improving at this rate, I’ll make a hunter of you in the course of seventy-five or eighty, or ninety or a hundred years. Come in to the banquet.”
Little Rifle was as “hungry as a bear,” and he accepted the invitation on the instant. Drawing the buffalo-robe aside, he saw a tempting, luscious supper awaiting him upon a ledge of rock, about a foot from the ground, on the center of which sat a lamp, giving out quite a clear light from the oil that the old hunter himself had extracted from some of the animals he had captured in his traps. Without loss of time, the two sat down, and began devouring the meal, chatting in the meanwhile, like old friends who had not seen each other for many days.
“I’ve been on quite a tramp sence yesterday,” said Old Ruff, with his cheeks swelling out with the juicy meat. “I went a good many miles up the stream, and I used my eyes.”
“Did you find the beavers any more plenty, than they are here?”
“Yes; ten thousand times, that is figgertively speakin’, as the preachers down in the settlements say. Peltries is plenty, but as is ginerally the case, the red-skins are as thick as grasshoppers, and they kept me dodgin’ round like a bull in fly time. We’ve got to send down to Fr’isco, for a lot of lamps to carry ’round at night, so as to keep from tumbling over ’em, and when we ride our hosses toward the fort, we’ve got to set a lamp on each ear to keep ’em from stepping onto ’em. I think I mashed a dozen or two of ’em, without knowing it, ’cause I mind me now that I stepped onto something, two or three times, that felt kind of soft.”
“They are strange creatures, Uncle Ruff, and I can’t understand why they should hate the whites worse than they hate the rattlesnake under their feet.”
“I s’pose ’cause the whites feel just as lovely toward them. You see it’s a squar’ deal all round.”