friend, as we have said, made him a present of the dogs.
Not being much of a dog fancier, he soon tired of old
Crusoe, and gave him away to a gentleman, who took
him down to Florida, and that was the end of him. He
was never heard of more.
When Crusoe, junior, was born, he was born, of
course, without a name. That was given to him afterwards
in honour of his father. He was also born in
company with a brother and two sisters, all of whom
drowned themselves accidentally, in the first month of
their existence, by falling into the river which flowed
past the block-house--a calamity which occurred,
doubtless, in consequence of their having gone out without
their mother's leave. Little Crusoe was with his
brother and sisters at the time, and fell in along with
them, but was saved from sharing their fate by his
mother, who, seeing what had happened, dashed with
an agonized howl into the water, and, seizing him in
her mouth, brought him ashore in a half-drowned condition.
She afterwards brought the others ashore one
by one, but the poor little things were dead.
And now we come to the harrowing part of our tale,
for the proper understanding of which the foregoing
dissertation was needful.
One beautiful afternoon, in that charming season of
the American year called the Indian summer, there
came a family of Sioux Indians to the Mustang Valley,
and pitched their tent close to the block-house. A
young hunter stood leaning against the gate-post of the
palisades, watching the movements of the Indians, who,
having just finished a long "palaver" or talk with
Major Hope, were now in the act of preparing supper.
A fire had been kindled on the greensward in front of
the tent, and above it stood a tripod, from which depended
a large tin camp-kettle. Over this hung an ill-favoured
Indian woman, or squaw, who, besides attending
to the contents of the pot, bestowed sundry cuffs and
kicks upon her little child, which sat near to her playing
with several Indian curs that gambolled round the fire.
The master of the family and his two sons reclined on
buffalo robes, smoking their stone pipes or calumets in
silence. There was nothing peculiar in their appearance.
Their faces were neither dignified nor coarse in
expression, but wore an aspect of stupid apathy, which
formed a striking contrast to the countenance of the
young hunter, who seemed an amused spectator of their
proceedings.
The youth referred to was very unlike, in many
respects, to what we are accustomed to suppose a backwoods
hunter should be. He did not possess that quiet
gravity and staid demeanour which often characterize
these men. True, he was tall and strongly made, but
no one would have called him stalwart, and his frame
indicated grace and agility rather than strength. But
the point about him which rendered him different from
his companions was his bounding, irrepressible flow of
spirits, strangely coupled with an intense love of solitary
wandering in the woods. None seemed so well fitted
for social enjoyment as he; none laughed so heartily, or
expressed such glee in his mischief-loving eye; yet for
days together he went off alone into the forest, and
wandered where his fancy led him, as grave and silent
as an Indian warrior.
After all, there was nothing mysterious in this. The
boy followed implicitly the dictates of nature within
him. He was amiable, straightforward, sanguine, and
intensely
earnest
. When he laughed, he let it out, as
sailors have it, "with a will." When there was good
cause to be grave, no power on earth could make him
smile. We have called him boy, but in truth he was
about that uncertain period of life when a youth is said
to be neither a man nor a boy. His face was good-looking
(
every
earnest, candid face is) and masculine;
his hair was reddish-brown and his eye bright-blue.
He was costumed in the deerskin cap, leggings, moccasins,
and leathern shirt common to the western hunter.
"You seem tickled wi' the Injuns, Dick Varley,"
said a man who at that moment issued from the blockhouse.
"That's just what I am, Joe Blunt," replied the
youth, turning with a broad grin to his companion.
"Have a care, lad; do not laugh at 'em too much.
They soon take offence; an' them Redskins never forgive."
"But I'm only laughing at the baby," returned the
youth, pointing to the child, which, with a mixture of
boldness and timidity, was playing with a pup, wrinkling
up its fat visage into a smile when its playmate
rushed away in sport, and opening wide its jet-black
eyes in grave anxiety as the pup returned at full gallop.
"It 'ud make an owl laugh," continued young Varley,
"to see such a queer pictur' o' itself."
He paused suddenly, and a dark frown covered his
face as he saw the Indian woman stoop quickly down,
catch the pup by its hind-leg with one hand, seize a
heavy piece of wood with the other, and strike it several
violent blows on the throat. Without taking the
trouble to kill the poor animal outright, the savage then
held its still writhing body over the fire in order to
singe off the hair before putting it into the pot to be
cooked.
The cruel act drew young Varley's attention more
closely to the pup, and it flashed across his mind that
this could be no other than young Crusoe, which neither
he nor his companion had before seen, although they had
often heard others speak of and describe it.
Had the little creature been one of the unfortunate
Indian curs, the two hunters would probably have
turned from the sickening sight with disgust, feeling
that, however much they might dislike such cruelty,
it would be of no use attempting to interfere with
Indian usages. But the instant the idea that it was
Crusoe occurred to Varley he uttered a yell of anger,
and sprang towards the woman with a bound that
caused the three Indians to leap to their feet and grasp
their tomahawks.
Blunt did not move from the gate, but threw forward
his rifle with a careless motion, but an expressive glance,
that caused the Indians to resume their seats and pipes
with an emphatic "Wah!" of disgust at having been
startled out of their propriety by a trifle; while Dick
Varley snatched poor Crusoe from his dangerous and
painful position, scowled angrily in the woman's face,
and turning on his heel, walked up to the house, holding
the pup tenderly in his arms.
Joe Blunt gazed after his friend with a grave, solemn
expression of countenance till he disappeared; then he
looked at the ground, and shook his head.
Joe was one of the regular out-and-out backwoods
hunters, both in appearance and in fact--broad, tall,
massive, lion-like; gifted with the hunting, stalking,
running, and trail-following powers of the savage, and
with a superabundance of the shooting and fighting
powers, the daring, and dash of the Anglo-Saxon. He
was grave, too--seldom smiled, and rarely laughed.
His expression almost at all times was a compound of
seriousness and good-humour. With the rifle he was
a good, steady shot, but by no means a "crack"
one. His ball never failed to
hit
, but it often failed
to
kill
.
After meditating a few seconds, Joe Blunt again
shook his head, and muttered to himself, "The boy's
bold enough, but he's too reckless for a hunter. There
was no need for that yell, now--none at all."
Having uttered this sagacious remark, he threw his
rifle into the hollow of his left arm, turned round, and
strode off with a long, slow step towards his own cottage.
Blunt was an American by birth, but of Irish extraction,
and to an attentive ear there was a faint echo of the
brogue
in his tone, which seemed to have been handed
down to him as a threadbare and almost worn-out heirloom.
Poor Crusoe was singed almost naked. His wretched
tail seemed little better than a piece of wire filed off to
a point, and he vented his misery in piteous squeaks as
the sympathetic Varley confided him tenderly to the
care of his mother. How Fan managed to cure him no
one can tell, but cure him she did, for, in the course of
a few weeks, Crusoe was as well and sleek and fat as
ever.
Crusoe/image001.jpg
A shooting-match and its consequences
--
New friendsintroduced to the reader
--
Crusoe and his motherchange masters
.
Shortly after the incident narrated in the last
chapter the squatters of the Mustang Valley lost
their leader. Major Hope suddenly announced his intention
of quitting the settlement and returning to the
civilized world. Private matters, he said, required his
presence there--matters which he did not choose to
speak of, but which would prevent his returning again
to reside among them. Go he must, and, being a man
of determination, go he did; but before going he distributed
all his goods and chattels among the settlers.
He even gave away his rifle, and Fan and Crusoe.
These last, however, he resolved should go together;
and as they were well worth having, he announced that
he would give them to the best shot in the valley. He
stipulated that the winner should escort him to the
nearest settlement eastward, after which he might return
with the rifle on his shoulder.
Accordingly, a long level piece of ground on the
river's bank, with a perpendicular cliff at the end of
it, was selected as the shooting-ground, and, on the
appointed day, at the appointed hour, the competitors
began to assemble.
"Well, lad, first as usual," exclaimed Joe Blunt, as he
reached the ground and found Dick Varley there before
him.
"I've bin here more than an hour lookin' for a new
kind o' flower that Jack Morgan told me he'd seen.
And I've found it too. Look here; did you ever see
one like it before?"
Blunt leaned his rifle against a tree, and carefully
examined the flower.
"Why, yes, I've seed a-many o' them up about the
Rocky Mountains, but never one here-away. It seems
to have gone lost itself. The last I seed, if I remimber
rightly, wos near the head-waters o' the Yellowstone
River, it wos--jest where I shot a grizzly bar."
"Was that the bar that gave you the wipe on the
cheek?" asked Varley, forgetting the flower in his
interest about the bear.
"It wos. I put six balls in that bar's carcass, and
stuck my knife into its heart ten times, afore it gave
out; an' it nearly ripped the shirt off my back afore I
wos done with it."
"I would give my rifle to get a chance at a grizzly!"
exclaimed Varley, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.
"Whoever got it wouldn't have much to brag of," remarked
a burly young backwoodsman, as he joined them.
His remark was true, for poor Dick's weapon was
but a sorry affair. It missed fire, and it hung fire; and
even when it did fire, it remained a matter of doubt in
its owner's mind whether the slight deviations from
the direct line made by his bullets were the result of
his
or
its
bad shooting.
Further comment upon it was checked by the arrival
of a dozen or more hunters on the scene of action.
They were a sturdy set of bronzed, bold, fearless men,
and one felt, on looking at them, that they would prove
more than a match for several hundreds of Indians in
open fight. A few minutes after, the major himself
came on the ground with the prize rifle on his shoulder,
and Fan and Crusoe at his heels--the latter tumbling,
scrambling, and yelping after its mother, fat and clumsy,
and happy as possible, having evidently quite forgotten
that it had been nearly roasted alive only a few weeks
before.
Immediately all eyes were on the rifle, and its merits
were discussed with animation.
And well did it deserve discussion, for such a piece
had never before been seen on the western frontier. It
was shorter in the barrel and larger in the bore than
the weapons chiefly in vogue at that time, and, besides
being of beautiful workmanship, was silver-mounted.
But the grand peculiarity about it, and that which
afterwards rendered it the mystery of mysteries to the
savages, was that it had two sets of locks--one percussion,