“Wouldn’t it ‘a’ been tur’ble if yer hadn’t caught him?” replied Ches. And then they simply whooped.
A good incident is an opal among gems in a lonely life. You can turn it over and over and always get new colors.
On the home trip, as Nimrod Jim stalked along with his follower trotting beside, they rehearsed every detail of the unexpected encounter. Jim crouched and leaped again, giving his sensations when the buck did likewise. Then he waited while Ches ran down a side hill and threw himself upon a sapling, which for the time was a deer’s hind leg.
They were just of an age—any one would have said so, on seeing them approach the cabin, arms flying, tongues wagging, bruised, tired and happy.
“Jim,” said a very sleepy little boy after supper, gorged like an anaconda, “yer don’t see t’ings like dat in N’york—not much yer don’t. If dat racket had come off in der Bowery, dere’d be head-lines—’dlines—on der extries—more’n a mile—”
Jim picked him up and tucked him into his bunk. “More’n a mile long—g’ nigh’,” sighed Ches.
Jim lit his pipe and went out for an evening smoke. It was some little time the next morning before he could realize what he was doing out there under the tree.
He had been in some ways a graver man of late. What he had undertaken as an experiment, a generous impulse, had been turned into a lasting responsibility.