“I make no manner o’ doubt you’re right, lad, but I’ve got my sea-legs on now, so to speak; leastwise I’ve got used to ridin’ in the trip out here, as well as used to steerin’ wi’ the tiller-ropes in front, which seems to me right in the teeth o’ natur’, though I couldn’t see how it could well be otherwise. But I confess that my chief difficulty is the ordnance, for it interferes a good deal wi’ the steerin’. Hows’ever—‘never ventur’ never win,’ you know. I never expected to take up a noo purfession without some trouble.”
As he spoke, the seaman’s horse—a large brown chestnut—put its foot in a hole, and plunged forward with great violence, barely escaping a fall.
“Hold on!” shouted Archie in alarm.
“Hold on it is!” sang out the sailor in reply.
And hold on it was, for he had the chestnut round the neck with both arms. Indeed he was sitting, or lying, on its neck altogether.
“It ain’t an easy job,” he gasped, while he struggled to regain the saddle, “when a fellow gets hove on to the bowsprit this way, to git fairly back on the main-deck again. But a Jenkins never was beaten in fair fight. That’s all right. Now then, Archie, you’re an obleegin’ cove. Do git down an’ pick up the gun for me. You see, if I git down it’s a tryin’ job to git up again—the side o’ this here craft bein’ so steep an’ so high out o’ the water. Thank’ee; why, boy, you jump down an’ up like a powder-monkey. It ain’t broke, is it?”
“No. It seems all right,” answered the boy, as he handed the gun to its owner. “But if you let it go like that often, it won’t be much worth when the run’s over.”
“Let it go, boy?” repeated the sailor. “It was either let it or myself go, an’ when it comes to a toss up o’ that sort, Fred Jenkins knows how to look arter number one.”
It will be seen from all this that our seaman was not quite so much at home on the prairie as on the sea. Indeed, if the expression be permissible, he was very much at sea on that undulating plain, and did not take so kindly to the green waves of the rolling prairie as to the heaving billows of the restless ocean; but, as Archie remarked, he was fast getting broke in.
The incidents which we have mentioned, however, were but the commencement of a series of disasters to poor Jenkins, which went far to cure him of a desire to excel in the “noo purfession,” and to induce a somewhat violent longing for a return to his first love, the ocean.