The fire was built down deep in a sort of gorge, where its cheery, crackling blaze could not be seen by any one until he was nearly upon it. The men sat with their pipes in their mouths, their rifles beside them and their feet toward the fire. From appearances they were on the best of terms. One of them needs no introduction, as he is our old friend Teddy, who evidently feels at home in his new situation. The other is a man of much the same build although somewhat older. His face, where it is not concealed by a heavy, grizzly beard, is covered by numerous scars, and the border of one eye is disfigured from the same cause. His dress and accouterments betray the hunter and trapper.
"And so, Teddy, ye're sayin' it war a white man that took away the missionary's wife, and hain't been heard on since. Let me see, you said it war nigh onto three months ago, warn't it?"
"Three months, come day after to-morrow. Begorrah, but it's not I that'll forgit that same date to my dying day, if, indade, I forgit it at all, at all, even whin somebody else will be wearin' me clothes."
"It was a dirty trick, freeze me if it wasn't; but you can allers find a white man to do a mean trick, when you can't a copperskin; that you may set down as a p'inted fact, Teddy."
"I belaves ye, Mister Tim. An Indian is a poor mean thing at the bist, an' their squaws—kah! they are the dirtiest beasts that iver jabbered human lingo; an' their babies, I raaly belaves, is caught with a hook an' line in the muddy creeks where the catfish breed; but, fur all that, I don't think they could have been equal to this piece of wickedness. May the divil git howld of his soul. Blazes, but won't there be a big squeal in purgatory when the divil gits howld of him!" And Teddy seemed to contemplate the imaginary scene in Hades with a sense of intense satisfaction.
"But it's powerful strange you could never git on the trail. I don't boast of my own powers, but I'll lay if I'd been in the neighborhood, I'd 've found it and stuck to it like a bloodhound, till I'd 've throttled that thievin' wretch."
"The Sioux spent the bitter part of the day in the s'arch, an' meself an' siveral other savages has been looking iver since, and none of us have got so much as a scint of his shoe, bad luck to him."
"But, Teddy, what made him do it?" asked the trapper, turning his keen, searching eyes full upon him.