“There,” he said, “you have quantity, quality, and variety, as I have before remarked. ‘The Murderous Sioux of Kalamazoo;’ that’s a good one. A hair-raising Indian story in every sense of the word. The one you are looking at is a pirate story, judging by the burning ship on the cover. But for first-class highwaymen yarns, this other edition is the best. That’s the ‘Sixteen String Jack set.’ They’re immense, if they do cost a quarter each. You must begin at the right volume, or you’ll be sorry. You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it’s rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You’ll enjoy this lot. I’m glad I brought them along.”
“It is a blessing,” said Renmark, with the ghost of a smile about his lips. “I can truthfully say that they are entirely new to me.”
“That’s all right, my boy,” cried Yates loftily, with a wave of his hand. “Use them as if they were your own.”
Renmark arose leisurely and picked up a quantity of the books.
“These will do excellently for lighting our morning camp fire,” he said. “And if you will allow me to treat them as if they were my own, that is the use to which I will put them. You surely do not mean to say that you read such trash as this, Yates?”
“Trash?” exclaimed Yates indignantly. “It serves me right. That’s what a man gets for being decent to you, Renny. Well, you’re not compelled to read them; but if you put one of them in the fire, your stupid treatises will follow, if they are not too solid to burn. You don’t know good literature when you see it.”
The professor, buoyed up, perhaps, by the conceit which comes to a man through the possession of a real sheepskin diploma, granted by a university of good standing, did not think it necessary to defend his literary taste. He busied himself in pruning a stick he had cut in the forest, and finally he got it into the semblance of a walking cane. He was an athletic man, and the indolence of camp life did not suit him as it did Yates. He tested the stick in various ways when he had trimmed it to his satisfaction.
“Are you ready for a ten-mile walk?” he asked of the man in the hammock.