“Well; the Amazon’s a longish bit of a river in those parts. I was out, as I told you, on the tramp.”
“So I should think! you look like the sort of man who has tramped everywhere, and done everything.”
“You’re about right there, for a wonder! I’ve druv cattle in Mexico; I’ve been out with a gang that went to find an overland road to the North Pole; I’ve worked through a season or two in catching wild horses on the Pampas; and another season or two in digging gold in California. I went away from England, a tidy lad aboard ship; and here I am back again now, an old vagabond as hasn’t a friend to own him. If you want to know exactly who I am, and what I’ve been up to all my life, that’s about as much as I can tell you.”
“You don’t say so! Wait a minute, though; there’s one thing—you’re not troubled with the hiccups, are you, after eating supper? (I’ve been a martyr to hiccups ever since I was a child.) But, I say, there’s one thing you haven’t told me yet; you haven’t told me what your other name is besides Mat. Mine’s Thorpe.”
“I haven’t heard the sound of the other name you’re asking after for a matter of better than twenty year: and I don’t care if I never hear it again.” His voice sank huskily, and he turned his head a little away from Zack, as he said those words. “They nicknamed me ‘Marksman,’ when I used to go out with the exploring gangs, because I was the best shot of all of them. You call me Marksman, too, if you don’t like Mat. Mister Mathew Marksman, if you please: everybody seems to be a ‘Mister’ here. You’re one, of course. I don’t mean to call you ‘Mister’ for all that. I shall stick to Zack; it’s short, and there’s no bother about it.”
“All right, old fellow! and I’ll stick to Mat, which is shorter still by a whole letter. But, I say, you haven’t told the story yet about how you lost your scalp.”
“There’s no story in it, Do you know what it is to have a man dodging after you through these odds and ends of streets here? I dare say you do. Well, I had three skulking thieves of Indians dodging after me, over better than four hundred miles of lonesome country, where I might have bawled for help for a whole week on end, and never made anybody hear me. They wanted my scalp, and they wanted my rifle, and they got both at last, at the end of their man-hunt, because I couldn’t get any sleep.”
“Not get any sleep. Why not?”
“Because they was three, and I was only one, to be sure! One of them kep’ watch while the other two slept. I hadn’t nobody to keep watch for me; and my life depended on my eyes being open night and day. I took a dog’s snooze once, and was woke out of it by an arrow in my face. I kep’ on a long time after that, before I give out; but at last I got the horrors, and thought the prairie was all a-fire, and run from it. I don’t know how long I run on in that mad state; I only know that the horrors turned out to be the saving of my life. I missed my own trail, and struck into another, which was a trail of friendly Indians—people I’d traded with, you know. And I came up with ‘em somehow, near enough for the stragglers of their hunting party to hear me skreek when my scalp was took. Now you know as much about it as I do; I can’t tell you no more, except that I woke up like, in an Indian wigwam, with a crop of cool leaves on my head, instead of a crop of hair.”
“A crop of leaves! What a jolly old Jack-in-the-Green you must have looked like! Which of those scars on your face is the arrow-wound, eh? Oh, that’s it—is it? I say, old boy, you’ve got a black eye! Did any of those fellows in the Snuggery hit hard enough to hurt you?”