“Lord! Lord!” continued the trapper, shaking his head, and still laughing, in his deep but quiet manner; “the boy mistakes a brute for a man!
Though, a Mingo is little better than a beast; or, for that matter, he is worse, when rum and opportunity are placed before his eyes. There was that accursed Huron, from the upper lakes, that I knocked from his perch among the rocks in the hills, back of the Hori—”
His voice was lost in the thicket, into which he had suffered himself to be led by Paul while speaking, too much occupied by thoughts which dwelt on scenes and acts that had taken place half a century earlier in the history of the country, to offer the smallest resistance.
CHAPTER VIII
Now they are clapper-clawing one another; I’ll go look on.
That dissembling abominable varlet, Diomed, has got that same scurvy, doting, foolish young knave in his helm.
—Troilus and Cressida.
It is necessary, in order that the thread of the narrative should not be spun to a length which might fatigue the reader, that he should imagine a week to have intervened between the scene with which the preceding chapter closed and the events with which it is our intention to resume its relation in this.
The season was on the point of changing its character; the verdure of summer giving place more rapidly to the brown and party-coloured livery of the fall.
The heavens were clothed in driving clouds, piled in vast masses one above the other, which whirled violently in the gusts; opening, occasionally, to admit transient glimpses of the bright and glorious sight of the heavens, dwelling in a magnificence by far too grand and durable to be disturbed by the fitful efforts of the lower world.
Beneath, the wind swept across the wild and naked prairies, with a violence that is seldom witnessed in any section of the continent less open.
It would have been easy to have imagined, in the ages of fable, that the god of the winds had permitted his subordinate agents to escape from their den, and that they now rioted, in wantonness, across wastes, where neither tree, nor work of man, nor mountain, nor obstacle of any sort, opposed itself to their gambols.
Though nakedness might, as usual, be given as the pervading character of the spot, whither it is now necessary to transfer the scene of the tale, it was not entirely without the signs of human life.
Amid the monotonous rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock arose on the margin of a little watercourse, which found its way, after winding a vast distance through the plains, into one of the numerous tributaries of the Father of Rivers.
A swale of low land lay near the base of the eminence; and as it was still fringed with a thicket of alders and sumack, it bore the signs of having once nurtured a feeble growth of wood.
The trees themselves had been transferred, however, to the summit and crags of the neighbouring rocks.
On this elevation the signs of man, to which the allusion just made applies, were to be found.
Seen from beneath, there were visible a breast-work of logs and stones, intermingled in such a manner as to save all unnecessary labour, a few low roofs made of bark and boughs of trees, an occasional barrier, constructed like the defences on the summit, and placed on such points of the acclivity as were easier of approach than the general face of the eminence; and a little dwelling of cloth, perched on the apex of a small pyramid, that shot up on one angle of the rock, the white covering of which glimmered from a distance like a spot of snow, or, to make the simile more suitable to the rest of the subject, like a spotless and carefully guarded standard, which was to be protected by the dearest blood of those who defended the citadel beneath.
It is hardly necessary to add, that this rude and characteristic fortress was the place where Ishmael Bush had taken refuge, after the robbery of his flocks and herds.
On the day to which the narrative is advanced, the squatter was standing near the base of the rocks, leaning on his rifle, and regarding the sterile soil that supported him with a look in which contempt and disappointment were strongly blended.
“‘Tis time to change our natur’s,” he observed to the brother of his wife, who was rarely far from his elbow; “and to become ruminators, instead of people used to the fare of Christians and free men.
I reckon, Abiram, you could glean a living among the grasshoppers: you ar’ an active man, and might outrun the nimblest skipper of them all.”
“The country will never do,” returned the other, who relished but little the forced humour of his kinsman; “and it is well to remember that a lazy traveller makes a long journey.”
“Would you have me draw a cart at my heels, across this desert for weeks,—ay, months?” retorted Ishmael, who, like all of his class, could labour with incredible efforts on emergencies, but who too seldom exerted continued industry, on any occasion, to brook a proposal that offered so little repose. “It may do for your people, who live in settlements, to hasten on to their houses; but, thank Heaven! my farm is too big for its owner ever to want a resting-place.”
“Since you like the plantation, then, you have only to make your crop.”
“That is easier said than done, on this corner of the estate.
I tell you, Abiram, there is need of moving, for more reasons than one.
You know I’m a man that very seldom enters into a bargain, but who always fulfils his agreements better than your dealers in wordy contracts written on rags of paper.
If there’s one mile, there ar’ a hundred still needed to make up the distance for which you have my honour.”
As he spoke, the squatter glanced his eye upward at the little tenement of cloth which crowned the summit of his ragged fortress.
The look was understood and answered by the other; and by some secret influence, which operated either through their interests or feelings, it served to re-establish that harmony between them, which had just been threatened with something like a momentary breach.
“I know it, and feel it in every bone of my body.
But I remember the reason, why I have set myself on this accursed journey too well to forget the distance between me and the end.
Neither you nor I will ever be the better for what we have done, unless we thoroughly finish what is so well begun.
Ay, that is the doctrine of the whole world, I judge: I heard a travelling preacher, who was skirting it down the Ohio, a time since, say, if a man should live up to the faith for a hundred years, and then fall from his work a single day, he would find the settlement was to be made for the finishing blow that he had put to his job, and that all the bad, and none of the good, would come into the final account.”
“And you believed the hungry hypocrite!”
“Who said that I believed it?” retorted Abiram with a bullying look, that betrayed how much his fears had dwelt on the subject he affected to despise.
“Is it believing to tell what a roguish—And yet, Ishmael, the man might have been honest after all!
He told us that the world was, in truth, no better than a desert, and that there was but one hand that could lead the most learned man through all its crooked windings.
Now, if this be true of the whole, it may be true of a part.”
“Abiram, out with your grievances like a man,” interrupted the squatter, with a hoarse laugh. “You want to pray!
But of what use will it be, according to your own doctrine, to serve God five minutes and the devil an hour?
Harkee, friend; I’m not much of a husband-man, but this I know to my cost; that to make a right good crop, even on the richest bottom, there must be hard labour; and your snufflers liken the ‘arth to a field of corn, and the men, who live on it, to its yield.
Now I tell you, Abiram, that you are no better than a thistle or a mullin; yea, ye ar’ wood of too open a pore to be good even to burn!”
The malign glance, which shot from the scowling eye of Abiram, announced the angry character of his feelings, but as the furtive look quailed, immediately, before the unmoved, steady, countenance of the squatter, it also betrayed how much the bolder spirit of the latter had obtained the mastery over his craven nature.
Content with his ascendency, which was too apparent, and had been too often exerted on similar occasions, to leave him in any doubt of its extent, Ishmael coolly continued the discourse, by adverting more directly to his future plans.
“You will own the justice of paying every one in kind,” he said; “I have been robbed of my stock, and I have a scheme to make myself as good as before, by taking hoof for hoof; or for that matter, when a man is put to the trouble of bargaining for both sides, he is a fool if he don’t pay himself something in the way of commission.”
As the squatter made this declaration in a tone which was a little excited by the humour of the moment, four or five of his lounging sons, who had been leaning against the foot of the rock, came forward with the indolent step so common to the family.
“I have been calling Ellen Wade, who is on the rock keeping the look-out, to know if there is any thing to be seen,” observed the eldest of the young men; “and she shakes her head, for an answer.
Ellen is sparing of her words for a woman; and might be taught manners at least, without spoiling her good looks.”