As Fred spoke, Betty Bevan, who rode in advance, reined in her horse,—which, by the way, had become much more docile in her hands,—and waited till her father overtook her.
“Is it not like paradise, father?”
“Not havin’ been to paradise, dear, I can’t exactly say,” returned her matter-of-fact sire.
“Oh, I say, ain’t it splendatious!” said Tolly Trevor, coming up at the moment, and expressing Betty’s idea in somewhat different phraseology; “just look at the lake—like a lookin’-glass, with every wigwam pictur’d upside down, so clear that a feller can’t well say which is which. An’ the canoes in the same way, bottom to bottom, Redskins above and Redskins below. Hallo! I say, what’s that?”
The excited lad pointed, as he spoke, to the bushes, where a violent motion and crashing sound told of some animal disturbed in its lair. Next moment a beautiful little antelope bounded into an open space, and stopped to cast a bewildered gaze for one moment on the intruders. That pause proved fatal. A concealed hunter seized his opportunity; a sharp crack was heard, and the animal fell dead where it stood, shot through the head.
“Poor, poor creature!” exclaimed the tender-hearted Betty.
“Not a bad supper for somebody,” remarked her practical father.
As he spoke the bushes parted at the other side of the open space, and the man who had fired the shot appeared.
He was a tall and spare, but evidently powerful fellow. As he advanced towards our travellers they could see that he was not a son of the soil, but a white man—at least as regards blood, though his face, hands, neck, and bared bosom had been tanned by exposure to as red a brown as that of any Indian.
“He’s a trapper,” exclaimed Tolly, as the man drew nearer, enabling them to perceive that he was middle-aged and of rather slow and deliberate temperament with a sedate expression on his rugged countenance.