At length, hot, brier-scratched, and weary, they came out on the hilltop. Jack was for immediate march, but Carington said:
“No. Get cool; you could not hit a barn-door now. Lie down a bit. You will want to be fully rested. As for me, I am half dead,” and he dropped on the scant soil. “Fine, isn’t it?”
A great sea of lesser hills was all around them, with here and there a rare sparkle of silver from distant windings of the river.
As for Jack, who lay on the summit, his eyes were eagerly searching the ravine down which they were to go.
“A friend of mine—oh, drop that bear, Jack; he’ll keep—a friend of mine says that to enjoy a view like this one must walk up. He has a notion that somehow the exercise absolutely increases your mental power to get the best out of it.”
Jack was not clear as to this, and he said so.
“I don’t understand it myself. I do not know why it is true, but it is true—for me, at least.”
“Maybe because it’s hard work,” said Jack.
He could not get his idea into proper shape, not having Ned’s facility of expression.
“Yes,” said Carington. “We like what is difficult to get; but that is not all of it. I suppose, if bears were as easy to get as omnibus horses, neither you nor I would go after bears.”
“What do you want to be, Jack, when you grow up?”
“Well, and after? The army is not a career, nowadays.”
“But there is first-rate sport in the West.”
“Yes; but that is for one’s idle hours. Life is a pretty big thing, Master Jack.”
“I build bridges, lay out railroads, generally scrimmage with nature to make life easier for man. How would you like that?”
“I don’t know.” He had a clever lad’s indisposition to commit himself. “Is it easy?—I mean, to learn. I hate books—school-books, I mean.”
“No; it isn’t easy. But it is work for a man. Go to a school of engineering for three or four years when you are older, and then come and help me to build bridges. All this energy of yours—all this hatred of defeat—this—well, you have the whole outfit, as we say in the Rockies, but it is no good unless you know how to do things. The fellows that know and have no steam, I don’t care about. Now, we want that bear, don’t we?”
“And first, we know how to get him, and then we want him so tremendously that torn breeches, scratched legs, and the like, make no kind of difference. Just patent that combination, and, as my friends down in Carolina say, ‘there you are.’”