It was not easy to surprise Zack; but this proceeding so completely astonished him, that he stared at the bank notes in speechless amazement. Mat took his pipe from a nail in the wall, filled the bowl with tobacco, and pointing with the stem towards the table, gruffly repeated,—“Take what you want.”
This time, Zack found words in which to express himself, and used them pretty freely to praise his new friend’s unexampled generosity, and to decline taking a single farthing. Mat deliberately lit his pipe, in the first place, and then bluntly answered in these terms:—
“Take my advice, young ‘un, and keep all that talking for somebody else: it’s gibberish to me. Don’t bother; and help yourself to what you want. Money’s what you want—though you won’t own it. That’s money. When it’s gone, I can go back to California and get more. While it lasts, make it spin. What is there to stare at? I told you I’d be brothers with you, because of what you done for me the other night. Well: I’m being brothers with you now. Get your watch out of pawn, and shake a loose leg at the world. Will you take what you want? And when you have, just tie up the rest, and chuck ‘em over here.” With those words the man of the black skull-cap sat down on his bearskins, and sulkily surrounded himself with clouds of tobacco smoke.
Finding it impossible to make Mat understand those delicacies and refinements of civilized life which induce one gentleman (always excepting a clergyman at Easter time) to decline accepting money from another gentleman as a gift—perceiving that he was resolved to receive all remonstrances as so many declarations of personal enmity and distrust—and well knowing, moreover, that a little money to go on with would be really a very acceptable accommodation under existing circumstances, Zack consented to take two ten-pound notes as a loan. At this reservation Mat chuckled contemptuously; but young Thorpe enforced it, by tearing a leaf out of his pocket-book, and writing an acknowledgment for the sum he had borrowed. Mat roughly and resolutely refused to receive the document; but Zack tied it up along with the bank-notes, and threw the beaver-skin roll back to its owner, as requested.
“Do you want a bed to sleep in?” asked Mat next. “Say yes or no at once! I won’t have no more gibberish. I’m not a gentleman, and I can’t shake up along with them as are. It’s no use trying it on with me, young ‘un. I’m not much better than a cross between a savage and a Christian. I’m a battered, lonesome, scalped old vagabond—that’s what I am! But I’m brothers with you for all that. What’s mine is yours; and if you tell me it isn’t again, me and you are likely to quarrel. Do you want a bed to sleep in? Yes? or No?”
Yes; Zack certainly wanted a bed; but—
“There’s one for you,” remarked Mat, pointing through the folding-doors into the back room. “I don’t want it. I haven’t slep’ in a bed these twenty years and more, and I can’t do it now. I take dog’s snoozes in this corner; and I shall take more dog’s snoozes out of doors in the day-time, when the sun begins to shine. I haven’t been used to much sleep, and I don’t want much. Go in and try if the bed’s long enough for you.”
Zack tried to expostulate again, but Mat interrupted him more gruffly than ever.
“I suppose you don’t care to sleep next door to such as me,” he said. “You wouldn’t turn your back on a bit of my blanket, though, if we were out in the lonesome places together. Never mind! You won’t cotton to me all at once, I dare say. I cotton to you in spite of that. Damn the bed! Take or leave it, which you like.”
Zack the reckless, who was always ready at five minutes’ notice to make friends with any living being under the canopy of heaven—Zack the gregarious, who in his days of roaming the country, before he was fettered to an office stool, had “cottoned” to every species of rustic vagabond, from a traveling tinker to a resident poacher—at once declared that he would sleep in the offered bed that very night, by way of showing himself worthy of his host’s assistance and regard, if worthy of nothing else. Greatly relieved by this plain declaration, Mat crossed his legs luxuriously on the floor, shook his great shoulders with a heartier chuckle than usual, and made his young friend free of the premises in these hospitable words:—