CHAPTER V. 



We have said that La Bonte was a philosopher : he took the 

 streaks of ill luck which checkered his mountain life with perfect 

 carelessness, if not with stoical indifference. Nothing ruffled his 

 danger- steeled equanimity of temper ; no sudden emotion disturbed 

 his mind. We have seen how wives were torn from him without 

 eliciting a groan or grumble (but such contretemps, it may be said, 

 can scarcely find a place in the category of ills) ; how the loss of 

 mules and mustangs, harried by horse-stealing Indians, left him in 

 the ne-iolus-ultra of mountain misery — " afoot ;" how packs and 

 peltries, the hard-earned " beaver" of his perilous hunts, were 

 " raised" at one fell swoop by freebooting bands of savages. Hun- 

 ger and thirst, we know, were common-place sensations to the 

 mountaineer. His storm-hardened flesh scarce felt the pinging 

 wounds of arrow-point or bullet ; and when in the midst of Indian 

 fight, it is not probable that any tender qualms of feeling would 

 allay the itching of his fingers for his enemy's scalp-lock, nor 

 would any remains of civilized fastidiousness prevent his burying 

 his knife again and again in the life-blood of an Indian savage. 



Still, in one dark corner of his heart, there shone at intervals a 

 faint spark of what was once a fiercely-burning fire. Neither time, 

 that corroder of all things, nor change, that ready abettor of obliv- 

 ion, nor scenes of peril and excitement, which act as dampers to 

 more quiet memories, could smother this little smoldering spark, 

 which now and again — when rarely-coming calm succeeded some 

 stirring passage in the hunter's life, and left him, for a brief time, 

 devoid of care, and victim to his thoughts — would flicker suddenly. 



