Christopher swung his pack to his back, thrust his arms through the straps, and marched away. Wade followed with a new light on some of the accepted ethics of human combat in the big woods. Old Jed shuffled behind, a toothless Nemesis gasping maledictions in stuffy tones.
“We’ll swing over the ridge and go through Misery Gore settlement, Mr. Wade,” said the old guide, after a time, divining the reason for his companion’s silence. “It may spoil your appetite for supper, but it’ll prob’ly straighten out some of your notions about me and that spring-gun.”
On the opposite slant of the ridge a ledge thrust above the hard-wood growth, and Christopher led the way out upon this lookout.
“There! Ain’t that a pictur’ for a Sussex shote to look at, and then take to the woods ag’in?” he inquired, with scornful disregard for any civic pride the patriarch of Misery might have taken in his community.
The few miserable habitations of poles, mud, and tarred paper were scattered around a tumble-down lumber camp, relic of the old days when “punkin pine” turreted Misery Gore.
“I suppose the man who named it stood here and looked down,” suggested Wade.
“It was named Misery fifty years before this tribe ever came here. I reckon they heard of it, and it sounded as though it might suit ’em. They’re a tribe by themselves, Mr. Wade. They’ve been driven off’n a dozen townships that I know of. Land-owners keep ’em movin’. I reckon this is their longest stop. This Gore is a surplus left in surveying Range Nine. Sort of a no man’s land. But they hadn’t ought to be left here.”
There was so much conviction in the old guide’s tone, and the contrast of utter ruin below was so great, its last touch added by the pathetic old figure in rags at the foot of the ledge, that the young man’s temper flamed. He had been pondering the spring-gun episode with no very tolerant spirit.
“For God’s sake, Straight, show some man-feeling. Is the selfishness of the woods down to the point where you begrudge those poor devils that wallow of stumps and rocks?”
Christopher received this outburst with his usual placidity—the placidity that only woodsmen have cultivated in its most artistic sense.