“Well, like them; but they’ve got most treemendous horns. I shot one last week with horns three fut six inches long; there they lie now in that corner. Are ye a good shot, March?”
“Middlin’.”
“D’ye smoke?”
“Yes, a little; but I an’t a slave to it like some.”
“Humph!” ejaculated Dick sarcastically. “If ye smoke ‘a little,’ how d’ye know but ye may come to smoke much, an’ be a slave to it like other men? Ye may run down a steep hill, an’ say, when yer near the top, ‘I can stop when I like’; but ye’ll come to a pint, lad, when ye’ll try to stop an’ find ye can’t—when ye’d give all ye own to leave off runnin’; but ye’ll have to go on faster an’ faster, till yer carried off yer legs, and, mayhap, dashed to bits at the bottom. Smokin’ and drinkin’ are both alike. Ye can begin when you please, an’, up to a certain pint, ye can stop when ye please; but after that pint, ye can’t stop o’ yer own free will—ye’d die first. Many an’ many a poor fellow has died first, as I know.”
“An’ pray, Mister Solomon, do you smoke?” inquired March testily, thinking that this question would reduce his companion to silence.
“No, never.”
“Not smoke?” cried March in amazement. The idea of a trapper not smoking was to him a thorough and novel incomprehensibility.
“No; nor drink neither,” said Dick. “I once did both, before I came to this part o’ the country, and I thank the Almighty for bringing me to a place where it warn’t easy to get either drink or baccy—specially drink, which I believe would have laid me under the sod long ago, if I had bin left in a place where I could ha’ got it. An’ now, as Mary has just left us, poor thing, I’ll tell ye how I came by the big iron pot. There’s no mystery about it; but as it b’longed to the poor child’s father, I didn’t want to speak about it before her.”
Dick placed an elbow on each knee, and, resting his forehead upon his hands, stared for some moments into the fire ere he again spoke.