Page:The New Penelope.djvu/105

 "A regular fort?"

"A stockade eighteen feet high, with an embankment four feet high around it, a strong gate, a tent in the middle of the inclosure, all my property, such as books, feed, arms, etc., inside."

"On account of Indians?"

"Indians and White Men. Yes, I've seen a good many Indians through the bead of my rifle. They learned to keep away from my fort. There were mining camps down in the valley, and you know the hangers-on of those camps? I sold beef to the miners; had plenty of money by me sometimes. It was necessary to be strongly forted."

"What a strange life for a boy! What did you do? How spend your time?"

"I herded my cattle, drove them to market, cooked, studied, wrote, and indulged in misanthropy, with a little rifle practice. By the time I had been one summer in the mountains, I had got my hand in, and knew how to make money buying up cattle to sell again in the mines."

"So there was method in your madness—misanthropy, I mean?"

"Well, a man cannot resign life before he is twenty-one. I was doing well, and beginning to think again of visiting the Wallamet to hunt up my girl. One Sunday afternoon, I knew it was Sunday, because I kept a journal; I was sitting outside of my fort writing, when a shadow fell across the paper, and, looking up, lo! a skeleton figure stood before me." (Sepulchral tones, and a pause.) "Used as I was to lonely encounters with strange men, my hair stood on end as I gazed on the spectre before me. He was the merest boy in years; pretty and delicate by nature, and then reduced by starvation to a shadow. His story was soon told. He had left Boston on a vessel coming out to the northwest coast, had been wrecked at the mouth of the Umpqua, and been wandering about in the mountains ever since, subsisting as best he could on roots and berries. But you are becoming tired?"