"I am sorry to see you looking so melancholy, Captain," said Lord H----, evading his question. "I hope nothing else has gone amiss."
"Haven't I cause enough to be melancholy," said the other, looking round at the people in the room, "cooped up with a penful of swine? Come out--come out to the door. It's cold enough out, but the coldest wind that ever blew is better than the filthy air of these pigs."
As he spoke he rose, and a little, pert-looking Frenchman, who had overheard him, exclaimed in a bantering tone: "Why you call us pigs more nor yourself de great hog?"
"Get out of my way, for fear I break your back," said Woodchuck, in a low, stern voice. "If your neck had been broken long ago, it would have been better for your country and for mine;" and taking up the little Frenchman by the nape of the neck with one arm, he set him upon the table from which he had just arisen.
A roar of laughter burst from a number of the assembled throats; the little Frenchman sputtered with wrath, without daring to carry the expression of his indignation farther; and Woodchuck strode quietly out of the room, followed by his military visitor.
"Here--let us sit down here," he said, placing himself on a bench under a leafless tree, and leaving room for Lord H---- by his side. "I am gloomy enough, my lord, and haven't I reason to be so? Here I am for life. This is to be my condition with the swine that gather up in these sties of cities, suffocating in such dens as these. I guess I shall drown myself some day, when I am driven quite mad. I know a man has no right to lay hands upon himself. I larnt my Bible when I was young, and know what's God's will, so I sha'n't do anything desperate so long as I be right here," and he laid his finger on his forehead. "No! no! I'll just take as much care of my life," he continued, "as though it were a baby I was nursing; but unless them Ingians catch some other white man and kill him--which God forbid--I've got to stay here for life; and even if they do, it's more nor a chance they'd kill me, too, if they got me; and when I think of them beautiful woods and pleasant lakes, with the pictures of everything round painted so beautiful on them when they are still, and the streams that go dancing and splashing along over the big black stones and the small white pebbles, seeming for all the world to sing as if for pleasure at their freedom, and the open, friendly air of the hillside, and the clouds skimming along, and the birds glancing through the branches, and the squirrels skipping and chattering as if they were mocking everything not so nimble as themselves, I do often believe I shall go crazed to think I shall never see those things again."
Lord H---- felt for him much, for he had in his own heart a sufficient portion of love for the wilder things of nature to sympathize in some degree with one who loved them so earnestly.
"I trust, Woodchuck," he said, "that we shall be able to find some employment for you with the army--if not with my own corps with some other, which may give you glimpses at least of the scenes you love so well, and of the unconfined life you have lived so long; but I have come to consult you upon a subject of much and immediate importance, and we must talk of that the first thing."
"What is that?" asked Brooks, in an indifferent tone, fixing his eyes upon the stones of the street, faintly lighted by the glare from within the house.
Lord H---- began his account of what had happened between the Mohawk and the Hudson with some circumlocution, for he did not feel at all sure of the effect it would produce upon his companion's mind, and the Woodchuck seemed to fall into one of those deep reveries in which one may be said to hear without hearing. He took not the slightest notice of what his noble visitor said regarding the burning of the wood, or the danger of Mr. Prevost and Edith. It seemed to produce no more distinct effect than would the wind whistling in his ears. He sat calm and silent, without an observation, but he grew more attentive, though only in a slight degree, when the narrator came to mention the anxiety of the family at the protracted absence of Walter; and when at last Lord H---- described the finding of the knife and the knapsack, and told of the conclusions to which the whole family had come, he started up, exclaiming: "What's that! What's that!" and then, after a moment's pause, he sank down upon his seat again, saying, with a groan: "They have got him--they have got him, and they will tomahawk him--the bloody, barbarous critters! Couldn't they have chosen some more worthless thing than that!"