The Indians soon selected the choicest, and departed, singing their strange, monotonous chant.
Presently Burly Bill himself appeared.
He stood there amazed and astonished for fully half a minute before he could speak, and when he did it was to revert to his good old-fashioned Berkshire dialect.
"My eye and Elizabeth Martin!" he exclaimed. "What be all that? Well, I never! 'Ad an 'urricane, then?"
"It looks a trifle like it, Bill; but sit you down. Got your meerschaum?"
"I've got him right enough."
And it was not long before he began to blow a kind of hurricane cloud. For when Bill smoked furnaces weren't in it.
"Do you think we have many more rapids to get past, Bill?"
"A main lot on 'em, Master Roland. But we've got to do 'em. We haven't got to funk, has we?"
"Oh no, Bill! but don't you think that we might have done better to have kept to the land altogether?"