"Ding-dong bell, when the fools are all dead,
Then we will have plenty of butter and bread,
won't we, Pow-wow?"
CHAPTER III.
Meets with the Object of His Love.
So, next Monday, Jervis Whitney set out on his long tramp, with Pow-wow for company, and with Black Bess, his rifle, to keep them supplied with game, their chief dependence for subsistence while traveling the five hundred miles of wilderness, which lay between them and their old home beyond the Alleghenies. While they were gone, Sprigg kept count of the months and weeks and days, and, as they went silently gliding by, he went silently dreaming on about the red moccasins. Silently, for never another word said he to his mother concerning the matter he had so near at heart. He knew she would laugh at him, and call him a monkey—our hero, bear in mind, being as touchy to ridicule as a raw mouth to ginger. You might scold him and rate him, sneap him and snub him, to a degree you would suppose sufficient to break the heart of any boy who knew his catechism, yet not a fig nor a flint would he care for it all. Perhaps, he would kick up his heels in the very face of your reproof; or, it may be, merely wrinkle up his saucy young knob of a nose, thereby saying as plainly as words could say it:
"Thin! thin!
When the wise waste words, then fools may grin,