Twice Bought

by R. M. Ballantyne

It was sad to see the way in which the poor boy carefully shook out and gathered up the few crumbs in his wallet so that not one of them should be lost; and how slowly he ate them, as if to prolong the sensation of being gratified! During the two days which he had spent in the forest his face had grown perceptibly thinner, and his strength had certainly diminished. Even the reckless look of defiant joviality, which was one of the boy’s chief characteristics, had given place to a restless anxiety that prevented his seeing humour in anything, and induced a feeling of impatience when a joke chanced irresistibly to bubble up in his mind. He was once again reduced almost to the weeping point, but his sensations were somewhat different for, when he had stood gazing at the wreck of Bevan’s home, the nether lip had trembled because of the sorrows of friends, whereas now he was sorrowing because of an exhausted nature, a weakened heart, and a sinking spirit. But the spirit had not yet utterly given way!

“Come!” he cried, starting up. “This won’t do, Tolly. Be a man! Why, only think—you have got over two days and two nights. That was the time allowed you by Paul, so your journey’s all but done—must be. Of course those brutes—forgive me, pony, that brute, I mean—has made me go much slower than if I had come on my own legs, but notwithstanding, it cannot be—hallo! what’s that!”

The exclamation had reference to a small dark object which lay a few yards from the spot on which he sat. He ran and picked it up. It was Tom Brixton’s cap—with his name rudely written on the lining. Beside it lay a piece of bark on which was pencil-writing.

With eager, anxious haste the boy began to peruse it, but he was unaccustomed to read handwriting, and when poor Tom had pencilled the lines his hand was weak and his brain confused, so that the characters were doubly difficult to decipher. After much and prolonged effort the boy made out the beginning. It ran thus:

“This is probably the last letter that I, Tom Brixton, shall ever write. (I put down my name now, in case I never finish it.) O dearest mother!—”

Emotion had no doubt rendered the hand less steady at this point, for here the words were quite illegible—at least to little Trevor—who finally gave up the attempt in despair. The effect of this discovery, however, was to send the young blood coursing wildly through the veins, so that a great measure of strength returned, as if by magic.

The boy’s first care was naturally to look for traces of the lost man, and he set about this with a dull fear at his heart, lest at any moment he should come upon the dead body of his friend. In a few minutes he discovered the track made by the Indians, which led him to the spot near to the spring where Tom had fallen. To his now fully-awakened senses Trevor easily read the story, as far as signs could tell it.

Brixton had been all but starved to death. He had lain down under a tree to die—the very tree under which he himself had so recently given way to despair. While lying there he—Brixton—had scrawled his last words on the bit of birch-bark. Then he had tried to reach the spring, but had fainted either before reaching it or after leaving. This he knew, because the mark of Tom’s coat, part of his waist-belt and the handle of his bowie-knife were all impressed on the softish ground with sufficient distinctness to be discerned by a sharp eye. The moccasined footprints told of Indians having found Brixton—still alive, for they would not have taken the trouble to carry him off if he had been dead. The various sizes of the moccasined feet told that the party of Indians numbered three; and the trail of the red men, with its occasional halting-places, pointed out clearly the direction in which they had gone. Happily this was also the direction in which little Trevor was going.

Of course the boy did not read this off as readily as we have written it all down. It cost him upwards of an hour’s patient research; but when at last he did arrive at the result of his studies he wasted no time in idle speculation. His first duty was to reach Simpson’s Gully, discover his friend Paul Bevan, and deliver to him the piece of birch-bark he had found, and the information he had gleaned.

By the time Tolly had come to this conclusion his horse and pony had obtained both rest and nourishment enough to enable them to raise their drooping heads and tails an inch or two, so that when the boy mounted the former with some of his old dash and energy, it shook its head, gave a short snort, and went off at a fair trot.