“So?” Phil simply said, as he continued with deft strokes to hack away at the part of the dead caribou’s carcass he meant to carry off with him.
Unable to stay there and be defied so boldly, the sportsman turned his back on his tormentors. He looked as though he might be close on having a fit of some kind the last they saw of him.
Once he turned and shook his fist in their direction. X-Ray half raised his gun, as though to let him understand two could play at that game if he dreamed of firing at them; but apparently Mr. Bodman had no intention of risking a shot, for he moved away clumsily on his snow-shoes, with which he was no adept, it appeared.
X-Ray chuckled as though tremendously amused.
“Just hear him growling like a bear with a sore head, will you, Phil? My stars! but he does hate a fellow who has the gall to sass him to his face. I guess he’s so swelled up with a sense of his importance, that he expects everybody to fall to trembling when he says so high and mighty like: ‘I am James Bodman, huh!’”
“I feel that I did the right thing, X-Ray,” said Phil, working away industriously.
“You were more than generous to offer him half, when he didn’t deserve a pound of this meat,” said the other, scornfully. “What if he did draw blood, that wound wouldn’t have feazed the caribou even a little bit. But it seems that Mr. Bodman’s policy has been rule or ruin all his life, and he can’t get away from it. In plain language I’d call him the Great American Hog.”
“I’d hate to have any dealings with that sort of a man,” Phil continued. “He’s the kind that always wants the best, and others can take the leavings.”
“That’s how he got his millions, I reckon,” X-Ray suggested. “Seems that there’s a glut in the market of hard cases up here in this Canadian bush while we’re on our little hunt, what with this bully, and that other one to boot.”
“Meaning Anson Baylay, the poacher, and all-round terror of the backwoods, eh, X-Ray?”