“What a glorious entry that would make in the log!” said the doctor, in a low tone, soliloquizingly, as if he made the remark merely for his own satisfaction, while he tapped the ashes out of his pipe.
The skipper looked as if he meditated a sharp reply; but his intentions, whatever they might have been, were interrupted by the opening of the door, and the entrance of the accountant, bearing under his arm a packet of letters.
A general rush was made upon him, and in a few minutes a dead silence reigned in the hall, broken only at intervals by an exclamation of surprise or pathos, as the inmates, in the retirement of their separate apartments, perused letters from friends in the interior of the country and friends at home: letters that were old—some of them bearing dates many months back—and travel-stained, but new and fresh and cheering, nevertheless, to their owners, as the clear bright sun in winter or the verdant leaves in spring.
Harry Somerville’s letters were numerous and long. He had several from friends in Red River, besides one or two from other parts of the Indian country, and one—it was very thick and heavy—that bore the post-marks of Britain. It was late that night ere the last candle was extinguished in the hall, and it was late too before Harry Somerville ceased to peruse and re-peruse the long letter from home, and found time or inclination to devote to his other correspondents. Among the rest was a letter from his old friend and companion, Charley Kennedy, which ran as follows:—
MY DEAR HARRY,—It really seems more than an age since I saw you. Your last epistle, written in the perturbation of mind consequent upon being doomed to spend another winter at York Fort, reached me only a few days ago, and filled me with pleasant recollections of other days. Oh! man, how much I wish that you were with me in this beautiful country! You are aware that I have been what they call “roughing it” since you and I parted on the shores of Lake Winnipeg; but, my dear fellow, the idea that most people have of what that phrase means is a very erroneous one indeed. “Roughing it,” I certainly have been, inasmuch as I have been living on rough fare, associating with rough men, and sleeping on rough beds under the starry sky; but I assure you that all this is not half so rough upon the constitution as what they call leading an _easy life_, which is simply a life that makes a poor fellow stagnate, body and spirit, till the one comes to be unable to digest its food, and the other incompetent to jump at so much as half an idea. Anything but an easy life, to my mind. Ah! there’s nothing like roughing it, Harry, my boy. Why, I am thriving on it—growing like a young walrus, eating like a Canadian voyageur, and sleeping like a top! This is a splendid country for sport, and as our _bourgeois_[4] has taken it into his head that I am a good hand at making friends with the Indians, he has sent me out on several expeditions, and afforded me some famous opportunities of seeing life among the red-skins. There is a talk just now of establishing a new outpost in this district, so if I succeed in persuading the governor to let me accompany the party, I shall have something interesting to write about in my next letter. By the way, I wrote to you a month ago, by two Indians who said they were going to the missionary station at Norway House. Did you ever get it? There is a hunter here just now who goes by the name of Jacques Caradoc. He is a first-rater—can do anything, in a wild way, that lies within the power of mortal man, and is an inexhaustible anecdote-teller, in a quiet way. He and I have been out buffalo-hunting two or three times, and it would have done your heart good, Harry, my dear boy, to have seen us scouring over the prairie together on two big-boned Indian horses—regular trained buffalo-runners, that didn’t need the spur to urge, nor the rein to guide them, when once they caught sight of the black cattle, and kept a sharp look-out for badger-holes, just as if they had been reasonable creatures. The first time I went out I had several rather ugly falls, owing to my inexperience. The fact is, that if a man has never run buffaloes before, he’s sure to get one or two upsets, no matter how good a horseman he may be. And that monster Jacques, although he’s the best fellow I ever met with for a hunting companion, always took occasion to grin at my mishaps, and gravely to read me a lecture to the effect that they were all owing to my own clumsiness or stupidity; which, you will acknowledge, was not calculated to restore my equanimity.