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Allen had been so deeply covered by the sliding soil that he was already smothered, but Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters contrived to drag themselves on their knees, and opening a way with their bowie knives, to a projecting mass of harder clay, which had resisted the movement from above, and from thence they climbed to a natural platform at the extremity of a wooded ravine.
His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never be faithfully said to have learned to walk; and recalls, as the first incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives, teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Washita stage. Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming.
It is needless to say that there was a young lady in the case; I don't know what became of her, but during the rest of her life she could boast of having been the fair demoiselle on whose account the very last duel was fought in Ireland. Then the age of chivalry went out. The bowie knife was the British article bought in Liverpool.
"Forty-eight blood signs we counted," Bob reported, "where Injuns had been laid." "I reckon we'd best stay here awhile, just the same," Captain Jim Bowie counseled. "And we've got a man or two who ought not to be moved yet."
He bore no more resemblance to the popular conception of a western gambler than does a college professor to a coal passer. Mr. Hennage lived in his shirtsleeves, paid cash and hated jewelry. He had never been known to carry a derringer or a small, genteel, silver- plated revolver in his waist-coat pocket. Neither did he appear in public with a bowie knife down his bootleg.
The knife had been made by Bowie's brother Rezin out of a blacksmith's rasp. It was shaped in accordance with his own ideas, and James Bowie used it with terrible effect. It was the first of the celebrated "Bowie knives" which played so great a part in frontier quarrels. In the general mêlée which followed the death of Wright and Currey, six other men were killed and fifteen severely wounded.
They're carryin' nothin' but grass. These men have been out there cuttin' feed in the meadow for Cos' horses." "You're right, Panther," said "Deaf" Smith, somewhat crestfallen. "But we'll attack, just the same," said Bowie. "Our men need action. We'll follow 'em into that gully. On, men, on!" A joyous shout was his reply and the men galloped into the plain.
"To my mind the incident has Homeric elements. The Greeks would have looked at it in a large, legendary way. Here is Helen, strong and lithe of limb, ox-eyed, courageous, but woman-hearted and love-inspiring, contended for by all the braves and daring moonshiners of Cut Laurel Gap, pursued by the gallants of two States, the prize of a border warfare of bowie knives and revolvers.
All the time I had been breathlessly watching Jonathan I had, with the tail of my eye, seen him pressing desperately forward, and had seen the knives of the gypsies flash as he won a way through them, and they cut at him. He had parried with his great bowie knife, and at first I thought that he too had come through in safety.
It was the fashion in those days for bears to stand erect and wrestle catch-as-catch-can, trying to get the under-hold and hug the hunter to death, and the hunter invariably stepped in and plunged his bowie to the hilt in the heart of his foe.
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