He paused here, and John saw that his eyes were half closed and his head nodding. The ordeal had told on even his sturdy health.
In a thick, sleepy voice he added: "Ask Jim White; he knows the rest—he brought me in."
Jim White could add little to the story. Worth came into his camp, he explained, more dead than alive and "clean out of his head." He and his partner had cared for him and brought him to town as fast as the teams could go.
John's father was taken over to his own shack, where his wife greeted him like one come back from the dead. Under her good nursing he recovered from his terrible experience in a marvellously short time and became again his own sturdy self. The frontiersman must of necessity be possessed of an iron constitution, for he must be able to endure hardships of all kinds—intense heat and piercing cold, hunger and thirst, fatigue and pain, that would either kill an ordinary man outright or cripple him for life.
It was with inward dread that the little family watched its head start off again, after a few weeks' stay in town. Outwardly, however, cheerfulness, almost indifference, was manifested. This time he went with a party which was going in the same direction; the danger was, consequently, not so great. Then, too, the cold weather kept the Indians pretty close to their own camps, and as the locations of these were generally known, they could be easily avoided.
The boys' hearts were gladdened by the news that, perhaps, the home shack would be abandoned in the spring, when their father returned. If so, the whole family would "hit the trail" to the north and west.
Up to this time the Worth boys had been town dwellers, though in these days Bismarck could hardly be dignified even by the name of village. John and Ben, in common with the few other boys, had enjoyed the comparatively tame pleasures afforded by the town and the surrounding prairie. All large game had been driven west, and only prairie dogs, gophers, coyotes, and occasionally wolves remained; these and the birds the boys used to shoot at day after day with their ever-ready revolvers. The sport in the river was not all that could be wished for either, for the water was muddy and the bottom was full of quicksands. And if summer lacked diversions, winter was a still more uninteresting season, in that the pleasures were fewer and the discomforts greater.
It was therefore with great glee that John and Ben looked forward to this pilgrimage. A hilly country was to be visited, where game of all sorts abounded, where clear streams were plenty, and where new sports of all kinds were in prospect. Marvellous tales of trapping beaver, and hunting antelope, bear, and even buffalo, were brought in by hunters, so the boys were wild to enjoy these new pleasures.