GEORGE IN CAMP;
OR,
LIFE ON THE PLAINS.
CHAPTER I.
AMONG THE TEXANS.
“I don’t like the way things are going at all, and I just wish those two people were back where they came from. They have turned the ranche upside down since they have been here, and now I begin to feel as though they were the masters, and that I have no more rights than a tramp who had dropped in to beg a night’s lodging!”
The speaker, a sturdy, broad-shouldered youth, about fifteen years of age, was sitting on the porch in front of the house in which he lived, busily engaged in mending a broken bridle with an awl and a piece of waxed-end. His name was George Ackerman, and he was one of the boys whom we introduced to the notice of the reader in the concluding volume of the “Boy Trapper Series,” and of whose adventures and exploits we promised to say something more than we said then. We find him now at his home in Texas, where he had been born, and where he had always lived, with the exception of the two years he had passed in a distant city attending school. He was dressed, as all the boys and men in that country were dressed, for hard work; and he had done a good deal of it during his comparatively short life—not because it was necessary, but because he had been brought up to it. His father was very wealthy—no one knew how many horses and cattle he owned—and he had left a property worth between thirty and forty thousand dollars a year.
If money is what makes people happy, one would suppose that George Ackerman ought to be one of the happiest boys in the world; and so he was, up to the time his only parent died, which was about a year and a half previous to the beginning of our story. He had everything a boy could possibly wish for—good health, a kind and indulgent father, a comfortable and happy home, and all the other aids to complete happiness so dear to the heart of most boys, and for which Bob Owens and Dan Evans so impatiently longed—such as horses, dogs, jointed fish-poles and breech-loading guns. He had made a start in business for himself, and was thought by the boys of his acquaintance to be pretty well off in the world. He began when he was only nine years old, by herding cattle for his father at forty dollars a month, taking his pay in young stock which he selected himself. These increased in numbers and value during the two years he was away at school, and now he was the owner of three hundred head of cattle which he had paid for by his own labor, and which he could have sold any day for twenty dollars apiece. He had a herdsman of his own and colts enough to mount all the cronies he had left at school, and who had faithfully promised to visit him at no distant day in his far-away home. It was two years and more since he parted from those same cronies, and not one of them had ever been to see him. He never heard from them now. His correspondents had dropped off, one after the other, until he had not a single one remaining. His father was gone, too, and poor George felt much as he would have felt if he had been dropped suddenly on Robinson Crusoe’s lonely island, without even a man Friday to keep him company.
It is true, that there were plenty of people around him. His Uncle John and Cousin Ned lived in the same house with him, and there were a score or more of men, Americans and Mexicans, employed on the ranche as house-servants and herdsmen. He had four playmates close at hand—that is, two of them lived five miles east of him and the others eight miles west—and they were jolly fellows and he liked to be in their company. The time never hung heavily on his hands, for he was very industrious, and could always find something useful to do; but still he was lonely and homesick every hour in the day. The old house was not the same now that it was during his father’s lifetime. Uncle John had built additions to it, rearranged the inside of it to suit himself, and filled it with the most expensive furniture, such as had never been seen in the wilds of Texas before.
Uncle John and his son, who dressed as fashionably now as they did when they came from the States, and who took as much pains with their toilet as a couple of city dandies would have done, were very much pleased with the new order of things. They seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to idle away their time on the luxurious sofas and easy-chairs with which the old rancho was now so plentifully supplied; but George, with his heavy cowhide boots, coarse clothing and sun-browned face and hands, was sadly out of place among them.
Uncle John Ackerman lived somewhere in the state of Ohio. He was a poor man, and, up to the time of the death of his only brother, George’s father, was obliged to work hard for his living. That sad event, which brought so much sorrow and trouble to George, was the making of Uncle John, for the time being. It took him and his scapegrace of a son from a life of toil and placed them just where they had always wanted to be—in a position to live without work. Uncle John was made his nephew’s guardian and the executor of his brother’s will, and to him the property was left in trust, to be cared for and managed for George until the latter became of age, when it was to be turned over to him, less a certain sum, which Uncle John was at liberty to keep in payment for his services. If George died before reaching his majority, Ned Ackerman, Uncle John’s son, was to be the heir.