“Hunting for love of it?”
“No; for love itself, or rather the lack of love. A lovely lady in his native Lancashire would not smile; so he turned butcher of buffalo, bears, and big-horn.”
“Named he the ‘fair but frozen maid’?”
“Never. It seems there is something hapless or tragic about her destiny. She did not love him; so he came away to forget her. He made no secret of it. We arrived in Utah last July, on our way to see California. There he got letters from home, announcing, as he told me, some coming misfortune to the lady. As a friend, no longer a lover, he proposed to do what he could to avert the danger. I left him in Salt Lake, preparing to return, and came across country alone.”
“Alone! through the Indian country, with that tempting iron-gray, those tempting packs, that tempting scalp, with its love-locks! Why, the sight of your scalp alone would send a thrill through every Indian heart from Bear River to the Dalles of the Columbia! Perhaps, by the way, you’ve been scalped already, and are safe?”
“No; the mop’s my own mop. Scalp’s all right. Wish I could say the same of the brains. The Indians would not touch me. I am half savage, you know. In this and my former trip, I have become a privileged character,—something of a medicine-man.”
“I suppose you can talk to them. You used to have the gift of tongues.”
“Yes; I have choked down two or three of their guttural lingos, and can sputter them up as easily as I used to gabble iambic trimeters. I like the fellows. They are not ideal heroes; they have not succeeded in developing a civilization, or in adopting ours, and therefore I suppose they must go down, as pine-trees go down to make room for tougher stalks and fruitier growth: but I like the fellows, and don’t believe in their utter deviltry. I have always given the dogs a good name, and they have been good dogs to me. I like thorough men, too; and what an Indian knows, he knows, so that it is a part of him. It is a good corrective for an artificial man to find himself less of a man, under certain difficulties, than a child of nature. You know this, of course, as well as I do.”
“Yes; we campaigners get close to the heart of Mother Nature, and she teaches us, tenderly or roughly, but thoroughly. By the way, how did you find me out?”
“I heard some Pikes, at a camp last night, talking of a person who had sold a quartz mine for a wonderful horse. I asked the name. They told me yours, and directed me here. Except for this talk, I should have gone down to San Francisco, and missed you.”