“Come! This is a day to sit close to the fire and to smoke, if one is big. If one happens to be small, there is—let me see—I think there is chocolate.”
The trapper opened a small cupboard and drew out a tinfoiled package which he tossed over to David; then from his pocket he brought a pipe and a pouch. He held the pipe empty between his teeth, while he rebuilt the fire that was low on the hearth. When the fresh wood began to snap he drew up a chair for each of them, close, and proceeded to fill his pipe.
David gazed curiously about the room. It was large and it seemed to serve as kitchen, dining-room, sleeping and living quarters, all combined. The end where they sat by the open fireplace was for living and sleeping; the two comfortable chairs, the table with a reading-lamp, the small case with books, and the couch plainly told this. At the other end was a cookstove, the cupboard, water-pails, dish-rack, frying-pans and pots hanging against the wall, and a rough pine table with a straight chair. The walls were covered with skins and guns, cartridge-belts, and knives of all descriptions. Altogether David found it a very interesting place, almost as interesting as the man who lived there. His eyes came back to the trapper, who again was considering him gravely.
“It’s a bully good place for a man to live in,” was David’s enthusiastic comment.
“It is good enough for one who must live a stranger, in a strange land.”
For all his rough clothes and his calling, the man spoke more like a scholar than a backwoodsman; David had noticed that the first time he had spoken. He spoke with as educated a tongue as his own father; there was a slight foreign twist to it, that was the only difference.
“Where is your country?”
David asked it simply, not out of idle curiosity, but to place the man at home in his own mind.
“My country? Ah, what used to be my country is a little place, not so big as this one state of yours. It is somewhere near the blue Mediterranean, but it is nearer to Prussia. Bah! What does it matter? Nicholas Bassaraba knows no country now but the woods; no people but those.” He pointed to the skins on the walls.
“And you kill them!” The accusation was out before David realized it was even on his tongue.