“‘We can’t lose anything, Bob,’ Harry would say, laughing, ‘except our lives, and they ain’t worth much to anybody but ourselves; so I’m thinkin’ we’re safe.’”
Here Bob paused a moment to stir his tea, and look thoughtfully into the cup, as if there might be some kind of inspiration to be had from that.
He laughed lightly as he proceeded:
“I’m a bad hand at a yarn; better wi’ the gun and the ‘girn,’ Harry. But I’m laughing now because I remember what droll notions I had about what the Bush, as they call it, would be like when we got there.”
“But, Johnnie,” Harry put in, “the curious thing is, that we never did get there, according to the settlers.”
“No?”
“No; because they would always say to us, ‘You’re going Bush way, aren’t ye, boys?’ And we would answer, ‘Why, ain’t we there now?’ And they would laugh.”
“That’s true,” said Bob. “The country never seemed to be Bush enough for anybody. Soon’s they settled down in a place the Bush’d be farther west.”
“Then the Bush, when one is going west,” said Archie, “must be like to-morrow, always one day ahead.”
“That’s it; and always keeping one day ahead. But it was Bush enough for us almost anywhere. And though I feel ashamed like to own it now, there was more than once that I wished I hadn’t gone there at all. But I had taken the jump, you see, and there was no going back. Well, I used to think at first that the heat would kill us, but it didn’t. Then I made sure the want of water would. That didn’t either, because, one way or another, we always came across some. But I’ll tell you what nearly killed us, and that was the lonesomeness of those forests. Talk of trees! La! Archie, you’d think of Jack and the beanstalk if you saw some we saw. And why didn’t the birds sing sometimes? But no, only the constant bicker, bicker of something in the grass. There were sounds though that did alarm us. We know now that they were made by birds and harmless beasts, but we were all in the dark then.