Leon could make no defence, so he said nothing.
He lay for a long time thinking over the conversation he and his cousin had had with the hunter the night before, and there was one thing upon which he dwelt with no little satisfaction.
This new friend had not tried to turn them from their purpose. On the contrary, he had said all he could to encourage them. If his statements were worthy of belief—and Leon did not doubt them in the least—a hunter's life was one of ease and romance, and the only one that was all sunshine. It was true that a hunter was sometimes in danger of his life, but that was a matter of no moment in the opinion of Eben Webster. It only served to put him on his mettle, and to relieve the monotony of his existence.
Eben, according to his own story, was a typical hunter. He was of the same stamp as those doughty heroes who figure so extensively in cheap novels. He had, time and again, whipped all the hostile warriors that could get around him; and as for bears and panthers, he thought no more of shooting them than Leon did of bringing down a grouse or squirrel.
The boy could not help telling himself that Eben's stories differed widely from those to which he had listened in the bar-room, but still his faith in his new friend was not shaken.
He believed the latter, because he pictured life in the mountains just as he hoped to find it. It never occurred to him that the hunter had told him a pack of falsehoods, but he found out afterward that such was the case.
The loud ringing of a bell at the foot of the stairs interrupted Leon's meditations, and brought him and his cousin out upon the floor in a twinkling. They dressed with all haste, and, descending to the bar-room, found the guests loitering about, awaiting the call to breakfast.
Eben was there, and he sat beside the boys at the table. His tongue ran as rapidly as it had run the night before, and, among other things, he told the boys that he had been busy that morning looking up a mount for them, and had found just what they wanted.
A couple of gold-hunters who were stopping at the hotel, and were going to start for the States that day, offered to sell the horses they had ridden from the mines for a mere song—twenty dollars apiece, including saddles, bridles, and saddle-bags.
"They can't be good for anything if they can be bought as cheap as that," said Leon. "My father's horse cost six hundred dollars."