t Spirit bless and keep you! Good-bye,
Mary--till next spring."

March burst away from her, rushed out of the cave in a tumult of
conflicting feelings and great resolves, and despite a little stiffness
that still remained to remind him of his late accident, flung himself
into the saddle with a bound that would have done credit to the Wild Man
himself, and galloped down the rocky gorge at a pace that threatened a
sudden and total smash to horse and man. Had any of his old comrades or
friends witnessed that burst, they would certainly have said that March
Marston was mad--madder, perhaps, than the most obstreperous March hare
that ever marched madly through the wild regions of insanity.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

MARCH MARSTON AT HOME--HIS ASTONISHING BEHAVIOUR--NARRATION OF HIS
EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES--WIDOW MARSTON'S BOWER--THE RENDEZVOUS OF THE
TRAPPERS--A STRANGE INTERRUPTION TO MARCH'S NARRATIVE--A WILD SURPRISE
AND RECOVERY OF A LOST LOVER--GREAT DESTRUCTION OF HOUSEHOLD GOODS--A
DOUBLE WEDDING AND TREMENDOUS EXCITEMENT--THE WILD MAN OF THE WEST THE
WISEST MAN IN PINE POINT SETTLEMENT.

Three months passed away, and at the end of that period March Marston
found himself back again in Pine Point settlement, sitting on a low
stool at that fireside where the yelling and kicking days of his infancy
had been spent, and looking up in the face of that buxom, blue-eyed
mother, with whom he had been wont to hold philosophical converse in
regard to fighting and other knotty--not to say naughty--questions, in
those bright but stormy days of childhood when he stood exactly
"two-foot-ten," and when he looked and felt as if he stood upwards of
ten feet two!

Three months passed away, and during the passage of that period March
Marston's bosom became a theatre in which, unseen by the naked eye, were
a legion of spirits, good, middling, and bad, among whom were hope,
fear, despair, joy, fun, delight, interest, surprise, mischief,
exasperation, and a military demon named General Jollity, who overbore
and browbeat all the rest by turns. These scampered through his brain
and tore up his heart and tumbled about in his throat and lungs, and
maintained a furious harlequinade, and in short behaved in a way that
was quite disgraceful, and that caused the poor young man alternately to
amuse, annoy, astonish, and stun his comrades, who beheld the exterior
results of those private theatricals, but had no conception of the
terrific co