“Time enough to be blue and all put out when you have utterly failed,” Ree exclaimed one day. “And if you only make up your mind to it, it is the simplest thing in the world not to fail. If I were the general of an army, I wouldn’t own up that I was whipped as long as I had a breath left. Now just suppose that Washington had given up at Valley Forge!”
“Well, I want to say that the chap who starts out west thinking he is going on a frolic, will be mighty badly fooled,” John answered. “I am learning, but it is like the Indian who believed powder didn’t amount to much unless it was in a gun; so he filled his pipe with it. He learned a heap.”
“Ho, ho, pardners both!”
The voice came so suddenly to the young travelers, they started and looked around questioningly. With a flying leap from some brush which bordered the road, came an odd looking woodsman.
“Lift my ha’r if ye ain’t the nearest bein’ kittens of anythin’ I’ve clapped my old goggles on in the emygrant line in all my born days!” Putting his hands to his sides the stranger laughed uproariously.
“Oh, it’s funny, ain’t it!” exclaimed John Jerome, witheringly.
“Age is not always a sign of wisdom,” said Ree Kingdom in much the same tone.
“Right ye be, lad; right ye be,” said the woodsman, quieting himself. “But I swan I’m that glad to see ye so young an’ bloomin’, both, that it jes does me old eyes good. Where ye bound fer, anyhow?”
The speaker was tall and rugged, his age probably fifty years. A grizzled beard clustered round his face and his unkempt hair hung almost to his shoulders. On his head was a ragged coon-skin cap. All his dress was made of skin or furs, in the crudest frontier fashion. He was not a disagreeable appearing person, nevertheless, for his eyes twinkled merrily as a boy’s. Each in his own way, Ree and John noted these facts.
“I might say that we are going till we stop and that we came from where we started,” said John in answer to the stranger’s inquiry.