"In the face of the whole world, sir," I said, setting my teeth with a snap.
He held out his finely formed hand; I took it respectfully.
When he had gone away I drew Mount and Renard aside and asked them where Miss Warren was staying. They did not know.
"We'll make a tour of the town and find Shemuel; he knows," suggested Mount.
I assented, smiling bitterly to find myself so soon seeking Shemuel's company; and we three, clad in our soiled buckskins, descended the stairway and sallied forth into the sunlit streets of Pittsburg, arm in arm.
Riflemen, rangers, forest-runners, and the flotsam and jetsam from the wilderness were no rare spectacles in Pittsburg, so at first we attracted little attention. We would have attracted none at all had not Mount swaggered so, arms akimbo, fur cap over his left eye. He stopped at every tap-room, a sad habit of his in towns; and the oftener he stopped the more offensive became his swagger. The Weasel, too, strutted along, cap defiantly cocked, reaching up to tuck his arm under the elbow of his giant comrade, which at moments forced the little Weasel to march on tiptoe.
It was strange and ludicrous, the affection between these waifs of the wilderness; what Mount did the Weasel imitated most scrupulously, drinking whatever his companion drank, swaggering when he swaggered, singing whatever catch Mount sang. And the oftener they drank the more musical they became with their eternal:
"Diddle diddle dumpling,
My son John!—"
until I remonstrated so vigorously that they quieted their voices if not their deportment.