1 4 Sport and Life. 



the dreaded invasions of the bloodthirsty red man, chiefly the 

 Cheyennes, followed by the unheard-of ravages of the fiendish white 

 man's Border-Roughian war that turned such men as Quantrell 

 and the first edition of the James boys into beasts more savage than 

 hyenas, made Port from his earliest youth acquainted with rapine. 



Before he left his mother's lap, he saw bloodshed ; before he 

 could walk, he saw neighbours strung up and shot ; and before he 

 could read, he had killed his Indian. He left his home at the early 

 age of nine ; " going West " was his fancy, and the yet untrodden 

 wilds of the Rocky Mountains his dream. He passed a long trapper 

 apprenticeship under one of the old guard of fur-hunters, and his 

 subsequent career as Indian scout in one or two Indian wars on 

 the plains developed in him all those qualities which made him such 

 an invaluable companion in a country where certain risks were not 

 absent if the party was so numerically weak as ours was. It takes 

 moments of danger to discover a man's true grit the ''bottom 

 sand," as a plainsman would say. On the one or two occasions of 

 such a nature, when I happened to be at his side, his self-reliant 

 coolness convinced me that in times of risk, no less than at the 

 quiet camp fireside, I could have had no trustier companion. 



The manliness about Port and other men of his calling is not 

 that of the bravado, or that of the " bad man " of literature ; it is 

 the quiet unobtrusive manliness of a character that, while it knows 

 not what pusillanimous fear is, yet knows what death is of 

 a nature that, while born and bred to carry life on the open palm, 

 is yet for ever ready to do grim battle in its defence. 



Port was full of quiet, dry, western humour. His sallies spared 

 neither present nor absent ones. 



The two remaining men will take up less space. What I have 

 said of Port holds good for Edd and Henry. The first of the two 

 was Port's junior by several years Born in the East, he had come 

 West twelve or thirteen years before, and had ever since been 

 hunting and trapping. 



Henry, the boy cook and general factotum, was a lad of 

 seventeen, who had been with me for the last two expeditions. 



