“Mother,” replied Two-feet-ten earnestly (and becoming at least two feet eleven while he spoke), “I’ll try!”
This ended the conversation at that time, and we beg leave to apologise to our reader for having given it in such full detail, but we think it necessary to the forming of a just appreciation of our hero and his mother, as it shows one phase of their characters better than could have been accomplished by a laboured description.
Before March Marston had attained to the age of sixteen he had read aloud to his mother—not once, but several times—the “Vicar of Wakefield,” “Robinson Crusoe,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “Tales of a Grandfather,” “Aesop’s Fables,” and a variety of tales and stories and histories of lesser note—all of which he stored up in a good memory, and gave forth in piecemeal to his unlettered companions as opportunity offered. Better than all this, he had many and many a time read his Bible through, and was familiar with all its leading heroes and histories and anecdotes.
Thus, it will be seen that March Marston was quite a learned youth for a backwoodsman, besides being a hero and a “madman.”
CHAPTER TWO.
The Great Prairie—A Wild Chase—A Remarkable Accident and an Extraordinary Charger, all of which terminate in a Crash—Bounce talks Philosophy and tells of terrible Things—Our Hero determines to beard the Wild Man of the West in his own Den.
The rising sun lifted his head above the horizon of the great western prairie, gilding the upper edges of those swelling undulations that bear so strong a resemblance to solidified billows as to have acquired the name of prairie waves.
On the sunny side of these waves the flowerets of the plains were already basking in full enjoyment of the new day; on the summits only the tips of their petals were turned to gold. On the other side of those waves, and down in the hollows, everything was clothed in deep shadow, as if the still undissipated shades of night were lingering there, unwilling or unable to depart from so beautiful a scene. This mingling of strong lights and deep shadows had the effect of rendering more apparent the tremendous magnitude of those vast solitudes.
There were no trees within the circuit of vision, but there were a few scattered bushes, so low and insignificant in appearance as to be quite unobvious to the eye, except when close to the feet of the spectator. Near to a clump of these bushes there stood two horses motionless, as if chiselled in stone, and with their heads drooping low, as if sound asleep. Directly under the noses of these horses lay two men, each wrapped in a blanket, with his head pillowed on his saddle, and his rifle close at his side. Both were also sound asleep.
About a mile distant from the spot on which those sleepers rested, there grew another small bush, and under its sheltering boughs, in the snuggest conceivable hole, nestled a grouse, or prairie hen, also sound asleep, with its head lost in feathers, and its whole rotund aspect conveying the idea of extreme comfort and good living. Now, we do not draw the reader’s attention to that bird because of its rarity, but because of the fact that it was unwittingly instrumental in influencing the fortunes of the two sleepers above referred to.
The sun in his upward march overtopped a prairie wave, and his rays, darting onward, struck the bosom of the prairie hen, and awoke it. Looking up quickly with one eye, it seemed to find the glare too strong, winked at the sun, and turned the other eye. With this it winked also, then got up, flapped its wings, ruffled its feathers, and, after a pause, sprang into the air with that violent whirr–r which is so gladdening, yet so startling, to the ear of a sportsman. It was instantly joined by the other members of the covey to which it belonged, and the united flock went sweeping past the sleeping hunters, causing their horses to awake with a snort, and themselves to spring to their feet with the alacrity of men who were accustomed to repose in the midst of alarms, and with a grunt of surprise.
“Prairie-hens,” muttered the elder of the two—a big, burly backwoodsman—as he turned towards his companion with a quiet smile. “It was very thoughtful on ’em to rouse us, lad, considerin’ the work that lies before us.”
“I wish, with all my heart, they didn’t rise quite so early,” replied the younger man, also a stout backwoodsman, who was none other than our hero March Marston himself; “I don’t approve of risin’ until one wakes in the course of nature; d’ye see, Bounce?”
“I hear; but we can’t always git things to go ’xactly as we approves of,” replied Bounce, stooping down to arrange the embers of the previous night’s fire.
Bounce’s proper name was Bob Ounce. He styled himself, and wrote himself (for he could write to the extent of scrawling his own name in angularly irregular large text), “B. Ounce.” His comrades called him “Bounce.”
“You see, March,” continued Bounce in a quiet way, thrusting his rugged countenance close to the embers occasionally, and blowing up the spark which he had kindled by means of flint, steel, and tinder—“you see, this is a cur’ous wurld; it takes a feelosopher to onderstand it c’rectly, and even he don’t make much o’t at the best. But I’ve always noticed that w’en the time for wakin’ up’s come, we’ve got to wake up whether we like it or no; d’ye see, lad?”
“I’d see better if you didn’t blow the ashes into my eyes in that way,” answered March, laughing at the depth of his companion’s philosophical remark. “But I say, old chap,” (March had no occasion to call him “old chap,” for Bounce was barely forty), “what if we don’t fall in with a herd?”
“Then we shall have to go home without meat that’s all,” replied Bounce, filling and lighting his pipe.
“But I promised my mother a buffalo-hump in less than three days, and the first day and night are gone.”
“You’d no right to promise your mother a hump,” returned the plain-spoken and matter-of-fact hunter. “Nobody shud never go to promise wot they can’t perform. I’ve lived, off an’ on, nigh forty years now, and I’ve obsarved them wot promises most always does least; so if you’ll take the advice of an oldish hunter, you’ll give it up, lad, at once.”
“Humph!” ejaculated March, “I suppose you began your obsarvations before you were a year old—eh, Bounce?”
“I began ’em afore I was a day old. The first thing I did in this life was to utter an ’orrible roar, and I obsarved that immediately I got a drink; so I roared agin, an’ got another. Leastwise I’ve bin told that I did, an’ if it wasn’t obsarvation as caused me for to roar w’en I wanted a drink, wot wos it?”
Instead of replying, March started up, and shading his eyes with his right hand, gazed intently towards the horizon.
“Wot now, lad?” said Bounce, rising quickly. “Ha! buffaloes!”
In half a minute the cords by which the two horses were fastened to pegs driven into the plain, were coiled up; in another half-minute the saddle-girths were buckled; in half a second more the men were mounted and tearing over the prairie like the wind.
“Ha, lad,” remarked Bounce with one of his quiet smiles—for he was a pre-eminently quiet man—“but for them there prairie-hens we’d ha’ slept this chance away.”
The buffaloes, or, more correctly speaking, the bisons which young Marston’s sharp eye had discovered, were still so far-distant that they appeared like crows or little black specks against the sky. In order to approach them as near as possible without attracting their attention, it was necessary that the two horsemen should make a wide circuit, so as to get well to leeward, lest the wind should carry the scent of them to the