"I have heard of such things, but confess I never saw one.""Oh! deuce, with a vengeance.A trader, and no deep-sea! Why, boy, you cannot pretend to be anything of a mariner.Who the devil ever heard of a seaman without his deep-sea?""I do not pretend to any particular skill, Master Cap.""Except in shooting falls, Jasper, except in shooting falls and rifts," said Pathfinder, coming to the rescue;"in which business even you, Master Cap, must allow he has some handiness.In my judgment, every man is to be esteemed or condemned according to his gifts; and if Master Cap is useless in running the Oswego Falls, I try to remember that he is useful when out of sight of land;and if Jasper be useless when out of sight of land, I do not forget that he has a true eye and steady hand when running the falls.""But Jasper is not useless -- would not be useless when out of sight of land," said Mabel, with a spirit and energy that caused her clear sweet voice to be startling amid the solemn stillness of that extraordinary scene."No one can be useless there who can do so much here, is what Imean; though, I daresay, he is not as well acquainted with ships as my uncle.""Ay, bolster each other up in your ignorance," returned Cap with a sneer."We seamen are so much out-numbered when ashore that it is seldom we get our dues;but when you want to be defended, or trade is to be carried on, there is outcry enough for us.""But, uncle, landsmen do not come to attack our coasts;so that seamen only meet seamen."
"So much for ignorance! Where are all the enemies that have landed in this country, French and English, let me inquire, niece?""Sure enough, where are they?" ejaculated Pathfinder.
"None can tell better than we who dwell in the woods, Master Cap.I have often followed their line of march by bones bleaching in the rain, and have found their trail by graves, years after they and their pride had vanished to-gether.Generals and privates, they lay scattered through-out the land, so many proofs of what men are when led on by their love of great names and the wish to be more than their fellows.""I must say, Master Pathfinder, that you sometimes utter opinions that are a little remarkable for a man who lives by the rifle; seldom snuffing the air but he smells gunpowder, or turning out of his berth but to bear down on an enemy.""If you think I pass my days in warfare against my kind, you know neither me nor my history.The man that lives in the woods and on the frontiers must take the chances of the things among which he dwells.For this Iam not accountable, being but an humble and powerless hunter and scout and guide.My real calling is to hunt for the army, on its marches and in times of peace; al-though I am more especially engaged in the service of one officer, who is now absent in the settlements, where I never follow him.No, no; bloodshed and warfare are not my real gifts, but peace and mercy.Still, I must face the enemy as well as another; and as for a Mingo, I look upon him as man looks on a snake, a creatur' to be put beneath the heel whenever a fitting occasion offers.""Well, well; I have mistaken your calling, which I had thought as regularly warlike as that of a ship's gunner.
There is my brother-in-law, now; he has been a soldier since he was sixteen, and he looks upon his trade as every way as respectable as that of a seafaring man, a point Ihardly think it worth while to dispute with him.""My father has been taught to believe that it is honor-able to carry arms," said Mabel, "for his father was a soldier before him.""Yes, yes," resumed the guide; "most of the Sergeant's gifts are martial, and he looks at most things in this world over the barrel of his musket.One of his notions, now, is to prefer a king's piece to a regular, double-sighted, long-barrelled rifle.Such conceits will come over men from long habit; and prejudice is, perhaps, the commonest failing of human natur'."While the desultory conversation just related had been carried on in subdued voices, the canoes were dropping slowly down with the current within the deep shadows of the western shore, the paddles being used merely to pre-serve the desired direction and proper positions.The strength of the stream varied materially, the water being seemingly still in places, while in other reaches it flowed at a rate exceeding two or even three miles in the hour.
On the rifts it even dashed forward with a velocity that was appalling to the unpractised eye.Jasper was of opinion that they might drift down with the current to the mouth of the river in two hours from the time they left the shore, and he and the Pathfinder had agreed on the expediency of suffering the canoes to float of them-selves for a time, or at least until they had passed the first dangers of their new movement.The dialogue had been carried on in voices, too, guardedly low; for though the quiet of deep solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness.
The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water rippled, and at places even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body.All living sounds had ceased.Once, it is true, the Pathfinder fancied he heard the howl of a distant wolf, of which a few prowled through these woods; but it was a transient and doubtful cry, that might possibly have been attributed to the imag-ination.When he desired his companions, however, to cease talking, his vigilant ear had caught the peculiar sound which is made by the parting of a dried branch of a tree and which, if his senses did not deceive him, came from the western shore.All who are accustomed to that particular sound will understand how reaily the ear re-ceives it, and how easy it is to distinguish the tread which breaks the branch from every other noise of the forest.
