Читать книгу Little Rifle; or, The Young Fur Hunters онлайн

23 страница из 33

“Wal, my little pet, you’re back again,” he said, as he looked kindly down upon the lad, and reached out both his hands to grasp his. “Hello! You’ve got two guns have you? What does that mean? Have you been assassinating some traveling gunsmith?”

“No, Uncle Ruff, I took that from a Blackfoot Indian.”

“Found him asleep, I s’pose, with that ’ere piece hung up at the head of his bed.”

“No I didn’t, either,” continued Little Rifle, parrying the taunts of the grim old hunter, who always delighted in quizzing him. “I took it away from a red-skin that was wide awake as you are.”

“Oh, that’s it; I s’pose he’d been eating green persimmon or tough babies, that give him the chollywobbles so as to double him up with pain, and make him not care whether you took his gun, or his head. Why didn’t you bring his scalp? ’Cause he wouldn’t let you, I s’pose. Let me take a look at the gun and see whether it’s good for any thing.”

After turning it over very deliberately in his hands for several minutes, trying the lock and seeing that it was loaded, he pronounced it a “tollyble weapon.” And then, throwing aside his jesting words, he asked Little Rifle to give him the particulars of his encounter with the red-skin, and listened with great attention until he had finished.