cried Paul Hover, springing
actively forward from his place of concealment. "There was an air about
you, when you threw forward the muzzle of the piece, that I did not
like; for it seemed to say that you were master of all the rest of the
motions."

"You are right, you are right!" cried the trapper, laughing with inward
self-complacency at the recollection of his former skill. "The day has
been when few men knew the virtues of a long rifle, like this I carry,
better than myself, old and useless as I now seem. You are right, young
man; and the time was, when it was dangerous to move a leaf within
ear-shot of my stand; or," he added, dropping his voice, and looking
serious, "for a Red Mingo to show an eyeball from his ambushment. You
have heard of the Red Mingos?"

"I have heard of minks," said Paul, taking the old man by the arm, and
gently urging him towards the thicket as he spoke; while, at the same
time, he cast quick and uneasy glances behind him, in order to make sure
he was not observed. "Of your common black minks; but none of any other
colour."

"Lord! Lord!" continued the trapper, shaking his head, and still
laughing, in his deep but quiet manner; "the boy mistakes a brute for a
man! Though, a Mingo is little better than a beast; or, for that matter,
he is worse, when rum and opportunity are placed before his eyes. There
was that accursed Huron, from the upper lakes, that I knocked from his
perch among the rocks in the hills, back of the Hori--"

His voice was lost in the thicket, into which he had suffered himself to
be led by Paul while speaking, too much occupied by thoughts which dwelt
on scenes and acts that had taken place half a century earlier in the
history of the country, to offer the smallest resistance.

CHAPTER VIII

Now they are clapper-clawing one another; I'll go look on. That
dissembling abominable varlet, Diomed, has got that same scurvy,
doting, foolish young knave in his helm.
--Troilus and Cressida.

It is necessary, in order that the thread of the narrative should not be
spun to a length which might fatigue the reader, that he should imagine
a week to have intervened between the scene with which the preceding
chapter closed and the events with which it is our intention to resume
its relation in this. The season was on the point of changing its
character; the verdure of summer giving place more rapidly to the brown
and party-