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

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“Old Ruff went off on a hunt yesterday, and told me he would not be back for several days, and I’m to keep the old cabin till he shows himself again. I’ve done that often enough to understand it; but I wish he was home to-night.”

Something like a shade of sadness passed over the boy’s face as he uttered these words. It may be that it was only a natural feeling of loneliness; an evidence of that longing for companionship, which, at times, comes over us all, and is scarcely ever absent from youth.

“I wonder whether Uncle Ruff knows any more of my life than he has told me,” he added, following up the vein of thought. “That is little enough, at any rate. Years ago, when I was very young, he found me, and hasn’t any more idea than have I of who my parents are, and how it was I came to be in this part of the world.”

Little Rifle might have continued in this reverie for hours, even after the sun had disappeared, but for the fact that his surroundings prevented. That veteran of the Oregon woods, known as Old Ruff Robsart, had not kept him under his special training for years, without accomplishing something. One of his lessons was that when a hunter was outside of his cabin, or place of retreat, he should never go to sleep; which in more intelligible language meant that ‘day-dreaming’ or reverie, of all things was to be avoided, and the true hunter or trapper never failed to keep every faculty wide awake, on the alert for insidious danger liable at any moment to leap out upon him.