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Ross moved warily, alert to any sound. He might not be an expert woodsman, but he was learning fast, perhaps the faster because his false memories now supplanted the real ones. That night he built no fire, crawling instead into the heart of a rotted log to sleep, awakening once to the call of a wolf and another time at the distant crash of a dead tree yielding to wind.
It was true that, at this period, Phelps had lost something of the activity of his youth; and the habit of contemplative sitting on a log and talking increased with the infirmities induced by the hard life of the woodsman. Perhaps he would rather talk, either about the woods-life or the various problems of existence, than cut wood, or busy himself in the drudgery of the camp.
It seemed a strange thing for me to be trying to explain forestry to a forest ranger, but so it was. "Ken, it's all news to me. I've been on Penetier about a year, and I never heard a word of what you've been telling me. My duties have been the practical ones that any woodsman knows.
Lablache who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtlety of the other, and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gayly decorated buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his lips! Everyt'ing!
The Aid-de-Camp, meanwhile, had deposited his saddle in a corner near the fire, and on his return to the door, met the inhospitable woodsman advancing as if to court a personal encounter. "Now, I'll tell you what it is, friend," he said calmly, throwing hack at the same time the blanket that concealed his uniform, and what was more imposing a brace of large pistols stuck in his belt.
Well, Alderman's son, short is the tale to tell: we could not fail to follow the gear, and the slot led us into the wood, and ill is the going there for us shepherds, who are used to the bare downs, save Rusty, who was a good woodsman and lifted the slot for us; so he outwent us all, and ran out of sight of us, so presently we came upon him dead-slain, with the manslayer's spear in his breast.
Then, as if striving to be not ungracious, the woodsman said in a somewhat softer tone, "You can't see much of it, this evening, though, 'count of the mists. It'll fair up by morning, I reckon. You can see a long way from here, of a clear day, Mister." "Yes, indeed," replied Mr. Howitt, in an odd tone. "One could see far from here, I am sure.
"I wish I could go with you, David," declared Hippy earnestly. "I would, too, if I weren't tied up with a law suit which an irate traction company is waging against the city of Oakdale. Although I am not a woodsman, still I know the difference between a tree and a stump, and during my long and useful career I have killed numbers of slimy, slithery snakes."
The man nodded his head for so it seemed to him, a woodsman to whom trees in their general sense were common things. In this great growth he felt a quality and a presence. Its moods were as varied as those of life itself as it stood triumphing over decades of vicissitude, blight, and storm. "I wonder ef hit knows," said the girl, abruptly, "who hit war thet shot ye, Cal?"
When the Indians of Kentucky became quieted down, putting an end to the calls upon his courage and skill as a woodsman, he settled into a simple, respectable farmer. This monotonous life did not suit his disposition; and, as the tide of emigration into the wilds of Missouri was then commencing, where both game and the red man still roamed, he resolved to migrate in that direction.
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