THE GRAVE OF THE SILENT HUNTER. 201 
hardly necessary to repeat. I laughed heartily at the incident, 
and Charlie at once forget his wrath in a loud burst of merri- 
ment, when I recalled to his recollection the droll way in 
which our guide had acted for the last mile. He had been 
up to that time striding just ahead of our horses, gossiping 
in the gayest possible of saturnine humors, asking us all sorts 
of unsophisticated questions about the ways of the “settle- 
ments,” and telling us quaint anecdotes about Old Jake, who 
was the greatest man in the world, according to his estima- 
tion. Indeed, he had been keeping us in one continued roar 
of laughter at his simplicity,’ and a certain shrewdness 
combined, when suddenly a new thought seemed to have 
struck him. He had paused for an instant,—looked around 
him furtively, and then drawing over towards the left hand 
side of the ridge, had, from that time, commenced bearing 
down that side further and further, until when we had nearly 
reached this spot, he pointed here, without a word, and the 
next we saw of him he was “ splitting it’? down the ridge. 
“You remember, Charlie, we could get nothing, not one 
word out of him, with all your merciless rallying, after he 
made that sudden stop! Depend upon it, there issome fun 
in this, and that fellow has got this bluff-point somehow 
mixed up in the ridiculous superstitions common to his class!” 
After many merry comments upon this text, in the course 
of which, with our loud talking and laughter, we violated all 
the accepted rules of “driving,” which require, peremptorily, 
the most profound silence on the part of the “stander” as he 
approaches his “stand,’’ we came to the conclusion that as 
the mischief had no doubt already been done, and the deer 
turned back by the sound of our voices, we had just as well 
take it easy until the driver came in. So, seating, or rather 
stretching ourselves upon some mossy boulders, scattered 
around, we chatted away the next half hour very cozily, 
although an occasional eddy of the wind would bring up to our 
ears the distant babble of the hounds in the valley, and the 
