“Have you? Well now, that’s odd! How much I should like to see him. To tell you the truth, one of my chief reasons for coming here was to see him. What like is he?”
“Like Dick,” replied the girl quietly.
“Like Dick!” echoed March in surprise; “why, that’s what Dick said himself, and yet, by all accounts, his character must be very different from that of Dick, who seems to be the kindest, tenderest-hearted man that ever came to trap in the Rocky Mountains.”
“What does peepil say ’bout this Wild Mans of the West?” inquired Mary.
“That he’s awful fierce an’ terrible cruel, an’ ten or fifteen feet high, I forget which, for everybody gives him a different height.”
Mary laughed. “Bees that all?”
“Oh no! They say he eats men.”
Mary laughed again.
“An’ women and bars—raw.”
Mary laughed louder and longer than ever, and when she laughed she looked so ineffably sweet that March resolved to go on with the catalogue of the Wild Man’s virtues piecemeal, waiting for the laugh between each statement, until there was not another idea left in his brain for his tongue to utter. But this amiable intention was frustrated by the report of a gun outside, which echoed and re-echoed among these savage cliffs like muttering thunder. It was followed by a yell that caused Mary to start up with a look of horror and rush out of the cave, leaving the invalid in a most distressing state of uncertainty as to what he should do, and in no little anxiety as to what would happen next.