Resting there to drink, I looked curiously at my three companions. Such a company I had never beheld. There was the notorious Mount, a giant in stringy buckskins, with a paw like a bear and a smooth, boyish face cut by the single, heavy crease of a scar below the right eye. With his regular features and indolent movements, he appeared to me like some overgrown village oaf, too stupid to work, too lazy to try.
Beside him squatted the little Jew, toes turned in, dirty thumbs joined pensively, musing in his red beard. His boots had left the foreign mark which I had seen the day before in the trail; the Weasel's moccasins were those of Albany make.
I examined the Weasel. Such a shrunken, serene, placid little creature, all hunting-shirt and cap, with two finely chiselled flat ears, which perhaps gave him that alert allure, as though eternally listening to some sound behind his back.
But the mouths of these three men were curiously well made, bespeaking a certain honesty which I began to believe they perhaps possessed after all. Even Shemuel's mouth, under his thin, red beard, was not the mouth of treachery, though the lips were shrewd enough, God wot!
"Well," cried Mount suddenly, "what do you think of us?"
Somewhat embarrassed, I replied politely, but Mount shook his head.
"You were thinking, what a row of gallows-birds for an honest man to flock with! Eh? Oh, don't deny it. You can't hurt my feelings, but you might hurt the Weasel's—eh, Cade?"
"I have sensitive feelings," said the Weasel dryly.
"I think you all stood by me when I was in distress," said I. "I ask no more of my friends than that."
"Well, you're a good lad," said Mount, getting to his feet and patting my shoulder as he passed me.