“A sailor!” repeated Guy contemptuously. “Well, I have been, that’s a fact,” he added, suddenly recollecting that he had not yet donned his coonskin cap and suit of buckskin; “but I’m a hunter now. Did you never hear of the Wild Rough Riders of the Rocky Mountains?”
This was the name Guy intended to give to his band when he got it organized, and he thought he might as well begin to let people hear of it.
“No,” said the man, looking at Guy as if he were on the point of laughing outright, “I never did.”
“Well, I am one of them, and I want a good rifle.”
“This is a weapon I can recommend,” said the gunsmith. “Here are the molds that go with it. You can see that it carries a large ball. If a bear gets one of them in his head, it will be the last of him.”
“I’ll take it,” said Guy. “Now I want some other things to go with it.”
The gunsmith, who was all attention, handed out the other articles as Guy called for them—a game-bag, a powder-horn (which he filled with rifle-powder), a box of caps, a hunting-knife, two pounds of bullets to fit the rifle, as many pounds of bar lead and a ladle to melt it in, and also a poncho and a Mexican blanket, which he tied up in a bundle so that Guy could carry them over his shoulder. The trading was all done in twenty minutes, and when Guy walked out of the store he had thirty-five dollars less in his purse, and his first hunter’s outfit on his back.
“Now I begin to feel like somebody,” thought the boy, as he lifted his rifle to his shoulder and hurried down the road. “Mr. Schwartz has laid a rope’s end over my back for the last time. Don’t I wish I could see him just now? I’d show him how we rough riders are going to clean out the Indians. I’ll turn into the first hotel I find, get a square meal, and go to bed, knowing that there’ll be no one to awaken me with, ‘All you port watch, ahoy! Roll out lively, Thomas, or I’ll be down there after you.’ But after to-night I shall live in the open air altogether. I wish I had a horse. Those mountains seem a long way off. I shall find my first hunting-grounds among them.”
Guy trudged along the dusty road for the next two hours indulging in such thoughts as these, and very pleasant traveling companions he found them. Now and then he would be aroused by the sound of wheels, when he would wake up long enough to step out of the way of some passing vehicle, and then he would go on with his dreaming again.
At last he found what he was in search of—a hotel, the existence of which was made known to him by a faded sign swinging from the top of a high post, and which conveyed to those who passed that way the information that entertainment for man and beast was there furnished by Tom Davis. The hotel itself was a weather-beaten, tumble-down sort of a building, and was better calculated to repel than to attract customers; but Guy did not stop to look at it. If it could furnish him with plenty to eat and a bed to sleep in, that was all he cared for.