Jim and Joe are brothers, the first sixteen and the second fourteen years old. Last autumn they came to the north to attend school, and perhaps some of the readers of boys’ papers have made their acquaintance. If so, you will agree with me that they are bright, manly fellows, who, if their lives are spared, will become useful and popular citizens.
The father of the Allison boys was an officer of the Confederacy. With the wreck of a once handsome fortune, he went back to his old home in Florida, after the close of the war. He was still a young man, and had been fortunate enough to go through the whole “unpleasantness” without a scratch. He married an estimable lady from the north, who, in addition to her many fine qualities, had the not objectionable one of considerable wealth. So it came about that Colonel Allison bought a fine orange plantation in the land of flowers, and it was there that his daughter and two sons were born.
Like the boys of the south and west, Jim and Joe were accustomed to horses, guns and roughing it from earliest boyhood, though rather curiously neither of them could swim a stroke. They spent many an hour in the pulseless pine forests, in the oozy swamps and the dry barrens, finding enjoyment and sport where you and I would see nothing but wretchedness.
Only a few weeks before they went to the north they engaged in the memorable hunt of which I am going to tell you. Suspecting that it would be the last one they would be able to have together for a long time (for they were busy with their preparations for leaving home), they agreed to make it a thorough one so far as it was in their power to do so.
They told their parents not to be anxious if they saw nothing of them for two or three days, for they meant to go a long distance up the St. John’s and had resolved not to come back until they had obtained some experience worth the telling.
An hour later the boys had entered their dugout, in which they put up a sail, and with a mild but favoring breeze they moved at a fair rate up the river, which is probably the most widely known of any in Florida. They were provided with a substantial lunch, for though professional sportsmen might have scorned to make a provision that implied their own lack of skill, the brothers had no compunctions in the matter.
There was nothing in the woods that could take the place of Dinah’s corn cake, nor was there any game which the boys could prepare by the camp fire to be compared to the cold roast chicken which the same skillful cook took such pains to make ready for them. So, in going this long hunt, the boys did not mean to place any dependence on their guns for food.
It was quite early in the morning when they started. The St. John’s, with its shores sometimes wooded, and often low and marshy, wound in and out through the forest, but the current was sluggish, and it was not a difficult task to paddle the light dugout.
Now and than the youths took a shot at some of the game of which they caught a glimpse along the shore. It was not yet noon when they met a steamer, whose sputtering wheel at the stern churned the water into muddy foam, and whose deck was filled with excursionists. Many of these waved their handkerchiefs at the boys, who returned the salute.
By and by Jim remarked that if they meant to have a genuine old-fashioned hunt, they would have to leave the main river, where they met too many people. So they turned up the next tributary they saw.