“What’s the matter?” I asked with alarm, for John Mansell happened to be out also, and the fear struck me at once that something might have happened him.
“Matter? you would not ask it if you had been with us to-day and seen the moose,” replied the Colonel sadly.
“MOOSE? YOU DON’T SAY SO! WHEN? WHERE?”
“Moose! you don’t say so! when? where?” I exclaimed, and in this frantic query I was joined by the voice of the younger Mansell, who at that moment suddenly appeared behind us from the woods.
The Colonel’s voice choked itself in a feeble struggle at reply, and stacking his Winchester against the back of the tent, he threw himself with a disconsolate air down upon his bed. But Hiram, less crushed by the evident misfortune, kindly obliged me with a graphic detail of the trouble.
“OH, SUCH A PAIR OF HORNS!”
“It was down on the second Mansungun Lake. We was paddlin’ up that stream to the right, where we shot the mink yesterday, and the Kernel was whippin’ the stream with his fly rod, when all of a sudden we heerd a crackin’ of the bushes, and then out on the edge o’ the bank stalked one of the biggest bull moose I ever did see. He’d have weighed more’n a thousand pound, Nichols, sure as I stand here. Oh, such a pair of horns!” and the guide’s arms were raised in a tremendous gesture.
The Colonel groaned, and raising himself on one hand he swept the other frantically through the air and gave us a magnificent idea of the spread of the horns from tip to tip.