David. I used to
drift about with a bunch of fellows that Uriah Heep couldn't have stood
up against for five minutes. The Talisman is noble doings, too, but not
up-to-date. As for The Prairie and The Last of the Mohicans, them is
dissatisfying books,--they make you think, being as you lives in just
such quarters, interesting things might happen most any minute--and
they never does."

"Why, Brick!" Lahoma reproached him. "THIS has happened--" she nodded
at Wilfred Compton. "Don't you call that interesting?"

"That's the way _I_ discusses them books," returned Willock with
manifest satisfaction. "I wasn't never no man to be overawed by no
book, which, however high and by whoever wrote, ain't no more like life
than a shadow in a pool. Try to grab that shadow, and where is it?
Just to go out after game and climb the mountains all day and come home
of an evening to sit down to a plate of bacon and eggs, and another of
the same, with coffee smoking on the little stove, and Lahoma urging on
the feast--that's more of real living than you'd get out of a big
library. Ain't it, Bill?"

"Now WE want to talk, Brick," interposed Lahoma--"don't we, Wilfred?"

"So your cabin was built," Wilfred prompted her, "and the men took the
dugout."

"Yes--and then, oh! the most wonderful thing happened: a family
settled in the arm of the mountain at the west end--a family that had a
woman and a baby in it--a sure-enough woman with a sweet face and of a
high grade though worked down pretty level what from hardships--and a
baby that laughed, just laughed whenever he saw me coming in the
dugout--and I was over there every day. And that's how I got to be
like a woman, and know how to dress, and how to meet strangers without
being scared, and preside at table, and use language like this. Other
settlers began coming into Greer, but they were far away, and Brick and
Bill don't like folks, so they stayed shut up pretty close. But for
three years I had the mother and her baby to show me how to be a woman.
Then came the soldiers. Brick thinks a big cattle-king stood in with
Congress, and he got the soldiers sent here to drive out all the
settlers because they were beginning to farm the land instead of
letting it grow wild for the cattle. Anyway, all the settlers were
driven out of the country--and it's been four years since I lost my
only friends in the world--except Brick and Bill. What makes me and
Brick and Bill mad is, that the sold