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"I must hurry up and get myself hidden," said he, "or I'll see nothing to-night. Good night, Jabe. I'll not be back, likely, till along toward morning." The backwoodsman's usual response was not forthcoming. For some seconds he fingered his rugged chin in silence. Then, straightening himself up, he spoke with an air of mingled embarrassment and carelessness.
The people were restless and always on the move. After being a little while in a place, some of the men would settle down permanently, while others would again drift off, farming and hunting alternately to support their families. The backwoodsman's dress was in great part borrowed from his Indian foes.
Now the pines were dead and gone, except a few isolated giants standing gloomily among the maple plantations; but the backwoodsman's shanty had outlived all subsequent changes. Here, in the wide courtyard to the rear of Mr. Holt's house, it was preserved, like a curious thing set apart in a museum an embodiment of the old struggling days embalmed.
For he could not speak during a minute or two; his arm pressed heavily on the backwoodsman's sturdy shoulder, in the effort to steady the strong trembling that shook him from head to foot like a spasm of ague. 'Lost in the bush, you war? Well, that ain't agreeable nohow exactly; and Peter betook himself to a fumbling in his capacious pocket for a tin flask, containing some reviving fluid.
While Walter cut firewood, Robin and Roy cleared away the snow, using their snow-shoes as shovels, and prepared their meal. It was simple; a few mouthfuls of dried meat and a tin can of hot tea the backwoodsman's greatest luxury, next to his pipe. It was short, too. Half an hour sufficed to prepare and consume it.
I pretended to be paddling down the stream, till I was certain they were out of sight; but I was not going to desert my friends in that way; such is not the backwoodsman's law. When I knew that they were well ahead, I ceased descending the stream, and, pulling to the south bank, I made fast my canoe to some bushes, and waited till dark.
It is a doubtful blessing to the human race, that the instinct of translation still prevails, stronger than reason; and after one has once yielded to it, then each untranslated favorite is like the trees round a backwoodsman's clearing, each of which stands, a silent defiance, until he has cut it down. Let us try the axe again. This is to Laura singing.
Has my sister," continued he, raising his voice and glancing at the woman, "milk for a little daughter?" The backwoodsman's wife stared at her interlocutor in great astonishment. "Will she," continued the redskin, "give a share of her milk to a little daughter, who must else die of hunger?"
With the backwoodsman's cunning he hastened over the ground he had already traversed, chuckling in anticipation of her surprise when she found him waiting for her at the other end of the "short cut." He had noticed a path opening into the woods at a point almost opposite his own house, and naturally assumed that it was the one she was now pursuing in order to avoid an encounter with him.
He was himself a victim of the tender passion to the extent of being an exile from his Virginia home, which he had left on account of dangerously wounding a rival. But he was well touched with the backwoodsman's taste for joke and banter.
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