ed Tolly, "I just think I should. But, look
here, Mahoghany," continued the boy, with a troubled expression, "I've
promised to go out on the lake to-day wi' Leaping Buck, an' I _must_
keep my promise. You know you told us only last night in that story
about the Chinaman and the grizzly that no true man ever breaks his
promise."

"Right, lad, right" returned the trapper, "but you can go an' ask the
little Buck to jine us, an' if he's inclined you can both come--only you
must agree to leave yer tongues behind ye if ye do, for it behoves
hunters to be silent, and from my experience of you I raither think yer
too fond o' chatterin'."

Before Drake had quite concluded his remark Tolly was off in search of
his red-skinned bosom friend.

The manner in which the friendship between the red boy and the white was
instituted and kept up was somewhat peculiar and almost
incomprehensible, for neither spoke the language of the other except to
a very slight extent. Leaping Buck's father had, indeed, picked up a
pretty fair smattering of English during his frequent expeditions into
the gold-fields, which, at the period we write of, were being rapidly
developed. Paul Bevan, too, during occasional hunting expeditions among
the red men, had acquired a considerable knowledge of the dialect spoken
in that part of the country, but Leaping Buck had not visited the
diggings with his father, so that his knowledge of English was confined
to the smattering which he had picked up from Paul and his father. In
like manner Tolly Trevor's acquaintance with the native tongue consisted
of the little that had been imparted to him by his friend Paul Bevan.
Mahoghany Drake, on the contrary, spoke Indian fluently, and it must be
understood that in the discourses which he delivered to the two boys he
mixed up English and Indian in an amazing compound which served to
render him intelligible to both, but which, for the reader's sake, we
feel constrained to give in the trapper's ordinary English.

"It was in a place just like this," said Drake, stopping with his two
little friends on reaching a height, and turning round to survey the
scene behind him, "that a queer splinter of a man who was fond o'
callin' himself an ornithologist shot a grizzly b'ar wi' a mere popgun
that was only fit for a squawkin' babby's plaything."

"Oh! do sit down, Mahoghany," cried little Trevor, in a voice of
entreaty; "I'm so fond of hearin' about grizzlies, an' I'd give all