The words, seeming but too prophetic, pierce Jessie’s heart as arrow with poisoned barb. In an instant, her joy is gone, sunk into the sorrow of her sister. Herself sinking upon that sister’s bosom, with arms around her neck, and tears falling thick and fast over her swan-white shoulders.
Never more than now has her heart overflowed with compassion, for never as now has Helen appeared to suffer so acutely. As she stood, holding in one hand the symbol of bright happy life, in the other the dark emblem of death, she looked the very personification of sorrow. With her magnificent outline of form, and splendid features, all the more marked in their melancholy, she might have passed for its divinity. The ancient sculptors would have given much for such a model, to mould the statue of Despair.
Chapter Forty Eight.
A blank day.
On the frontier every settlement has its professional hunter. Often several, seldom less than two or three; their métier being to supply the settlers with meat and game—venison, the standing dish—now and then bear hams, much relished—and, when the place is upon prairie-land, the flesh of the antelope and buffalo. The wild turkey, too—grandest of all game birds—is on the professional hunter’s list for the larder; the lynx and panther he will kill for their pelts; but squirrels, racoons, rabbits, and other such “varmints,” he disdains to meddle with, leaving them to the amateur sportsman, and the darkey.
Usually the professional votary of Saint Hubert is of solitary habit, and prefers stalking alone. There are some, however, of more social inclining, who hunt in couples; one of the pair being almost universal a veteran, the other a young man—as in the case of Sime Woodley and Ned Heywood. By the inequality of age the danger of professional jealousy is avoided; the younger looking up to his senior, and treating him with the deference due to greater knowledge and experience.
Just such a brace of professionals has come out with the Armstrong colony—their names, Alec Hawkins and Cris Tucker—the former an old bear-hunter, who has slain his hundreds; the latter, though an excellent marksman, in the art of vénerie but a tyro compared with his partner.
Since their arrival on the San Saba, they have kept the settlement plentifully supplied in meat; chiefly venison of the black-tailed deer, with which the bottom-land abounds. Turkeys, too, in any quantity; these noble birds thriving in the congenial climate of Texas, with its nuts and berry-bearing trees.