“The devil you have!” cried Paul, dropping the morsel he was sucking, from sheer reluctance to abandon the hump, and casting a fierce and direct look into the very teeth of the unconscious physician. “I reckon, stranger, you have a mind to bag Ellen, too!”
“The riches of the whole vegetable and animal world united, would not tempt me to harm a hair of her head! I love the child, with what may he called amor naturalis—or rather paternus—the affection of a father.”
“Ay—that, indeed, is more befitting the difference in your years,” Paul coolly rejoined, stretching forth his hand to regain the rejected morsel. “You would be no better than a drone at your time of day, with a young hive to feed and swarm.”
“Yes, there is reason, because there is natur’, in what he says,” observed the trapper: “but, friend, you have said you were a dweller in the camp of one Ishmael Bush?”
“True; it is in virtue of a compactum—”
“I know but little of the virtue of packing, though I follow trapping, in my old age, for a livelihood. They tell me that skins are well kept in the new fashion; but it is long since I have left off killing more than I need for food and garments. I was an eye-witness, myself, of the manner in which the Siouxes broke into your encampment, and drove off the cattle; stripping the poor man you call Ishmael of his smallest hoofs, counting even the cloven feet.”
“Asinus excepted,” muttered the Doctor, who by this time was discussing his portion of the hump, in utter forgetfulness of all its scientific attributes. “Asinus domesticus Americanus excepted.”
“I am glad to hear that so many of them are saved, though I know not the value of the animals you name; which is nothing uncommon, seeing how long it is that I have been out of the settlements. But can you tell me, friend, what the traveller carries under the white cloth, he guards with teeth as sharp as a wolf that quarrels for the carcass the hunter has left?”
“You’ve heard of it!” exclaimed the other, dropping the morsel he was conveying to his mouth in manifest surprise.
“Nay, I have heard nothing; but I have seen the cloth, and had like to have been bitten for no greater crime than wishing to know what it covered.”