“Oh! I’m glad you’ve come back,” he cried, as Dick re-entered the cave; “I quite forgot my comrades—shame on me! but my miserable head has got such a smash, that a’most everything’s bin drove out of it.”
“Time enough to speak o’ them after we’ve seen to your bones,” said Dick.
“Nay, but—”
“After,” said Dick in a tone that was not to be gainsaid.
March submitted with a sigh, and his eccentric host proceeded to manipulate and punch him in a way that might perhaps have been highly necessary, but was by no means agreeable. After a few minutes he pronounced his patient all right, only a little bruised! Having said which, he proceeded to prepare some food, and said to March that he might now speak about his comrades.
At first he seemed to pay little attention to the youth’s hasty narrative; but on hearing that the Indians were hastening to attack the Mountain Fort, he sprang up, and asked a few questions eagerly. It was evident that the news troubled him deeply.
Taking one or two hasty strides up and down the cavern, and paying no attention to the roasting meat, which he seemed to have utterly forgotten, the Wild Man of the West muttered angrily to himself, and a slight dash of that tiger-like flash, which had gone so far to earn him his title, lighted up his blue eyes, insomuch that March Marston looked at him in amazement not unmingled with awe. Thoughts of the Wild Man of the West once more occurred to him; but in his former cogitations on that subject he had so thoroughly discarded the idea of this kind, blue-eyed hunter being that far-famed and ferocious individual, that his thoughts only took the form of the mental question, “I wonder if the Wild Man o’ the West could beat such a fellow as that at a fair stand-up fight?” So powerfully did this thought affect him, that he could not refrain from exclaiming—
“I say, Dick, did you ever hear of the Wild Man of the West?”
Dick was so much tickled by the question that his angry mood vanished, and, turning towards his guest with a smile, while his blue eyes seemed milder than they ever had appeared before, he said—
“Yes, lad, I’ve heard of him.”