“I heard the story about in this way: In less than an hour after I was stolen, a dirty, unkempt boy made his appearance in my master’s camp, and told him that he had been fishing on the pond all the afternoon, that he knew the man who took me, and for a reward of ten dollars he would follow me up and steal me back again.”
“Of course your master wasn’t deceived by any such shallow trick as that!” I exclaimed.
“Well, he was. You see, he and the two young fellows who come up here with him every summer, never hire a guide. As they seldom venture more than twenty or thirty miles away from the lake, and never leave the water courses, there’s really no need of a guide; but if they had had one when that boy came into camp, he would have saved my master from imposition. As it was, he promised to give him the ten dollars, and before sunset I was brought back. But it had rained buckets during my absence, I was wet inside and out, my master did not know enough to take care of me, and that’s how I came to be in this fix. They’re coming now, and we are off again, I suppose.”
I looked toward the hotel, and there was the young man with the gold eye-glasses, peaked shoes and downy upper lip—the same knowing fellow, who had been foolish enough to take a cheap gun that wasn’t warranted, with the expectation that it would do as good work as a Greener.
“We’re going up to the pond, and I shall be called upon to fire heavier charges than I can stand at every thing in the shape of a partridge or squirrel that comes in my way,” added the double barrel.
“You ought not to be required to shoot those birds at this time of year,” said I. “It’s against the law.”
“Oh, I don’t hurt them any. I only shoot at them. I never killed any thing.”
“That’s just what Mr. Brown said when he sold you,” thought I. “Have you a dog to guard your camp? Well, you ought to have. Matt Coyle lives up there, and night before last he made a daring attempt to steal this skiff, and then he tried to sink her. Don’t you see the hole in her side?”
I was going on to tell the double barrel that if his master did not keep his eyes open he might expect another visit from the squatter, but just then I saw Joe Wayring and his friends coming down the bank; and as I was more interested in them and the rods they carried on their shoulders, than I was in the fortunes of the seedy-looking fowling piece, I had nothing more to say to him. I saw him once afterward, and then he was a perfect wreck of a gun. There wasn’t enough of him left to sell for old iron.
“Haw! haw!” said Roy, as he jumped into the skiff. “We’ve got them back again, and only one of them is the worse for being stolen by that squatter.”