“Can’t help it, Dick! What mean you? I wish ye’d talk sense.”
“Hist!” exclaimed the hunter, pulling up suddenly under the shelter of a cliff. “Yonder come yer friends, sooner than I expected. I’ll leave ye here. They’ve not seed us yit, an’ that wood ’ll hide me till I git away. Now, March,” he added solemnly, “remember yer promise.”
In another moment the wild hunter was gone, and March rode forward to meet his comrades, who, having now caught sight of him, came up the valley at full speed, shouting and waving their caps joyfully as they approached. In a shorter space of time than it takes to tell, March was surrounded, dragged off his horse, passed from one to another, to be handled roughly, in order to make sure that it was really himself, and, finally, was swallowed up by Bounce in a masculine embrace that might almost have passed for the hug of a grisly bear.
Chapter Twenty Two.
March Marston is perplexed, so are his Friends—An unlooked-for Meeting—Terrible News—the Attack—The Wild Man of the West once again renders signal Service to the Trappers—Wild Doings in general, and March Marston’s Chagrin in particular.
“March Marston,” said Bounce—and Bounce was sitting beside the camp fire, smoking his pipe after supper when he said it—“you may think ye’re a ’cute feller, you may, oncommon ’cute; but if you’ll listen to wot an oldish hunter says, an’ take his advice, you’ll come to think, in a feelosophical way, d’ye see? that ye’re not quite so ’cute as ye suppose.”
Bounce delivered this oracularly, and followed it up with a succession of puffs, each of which was so solidly yellow as to suggest to the mind of Bertram, who chanced to be taking his portrait at that moment, that the next puff would burst out in pure flame. Gibault and Big Waller nodded their heads in testimony of their approval of the general scope of the remark; the latter even went the length of “guessing that it was a fact,” and Redhand smiled. Hawkswing looked, if possible, graver than usual.
“As,” resumed Bounce after a considerable pause, during which March looked and felt very uncomfortable, “the nat’ral eyes of the old men becomes more dimmer, d’ye see? their mental eyes, so to speak, becomes sharper, so as that they can see through no end o’ figurative millstones. That bein’ the case when there’s no millstone to be seen through at all, but only a oncommon thin trans—trans—”