not possess that quiet gravity and staid demeanour which often
characterize these men. True, he was tall and strongly made, but no
one would have called him stalwart, and his frame indicated grace and
agility rather than strength. But the point about him which rendered
him different from his companions was his bounding, irrepressible
flow of spirits, strangely coupled with an intense love of solitary
wandering in the woods. None seemed so well fitted for social
enjoyment as he; none laughed so heartily, or expressed such glee in
his mischief-loving eye; yet for days together he went off alone into
the forest, and wandered where his fancy led him, as grave and silent
as an Indian warrior.

After all, there was nothing mysterious in this. The boy followed
implicitly the dictates of nature within him. He was amiable,
straightforward, sanguine, and intensely _earnest_. When he laughed,
he let it out, as sailors have it, "with a will." When there was good
cause to be grave, no power on earth could make him smile. We have
called him boy, but in truth he was about that uncertain period of
life when a youth is said to be neither a man nor a boy. His face was
good-looking (_every_ earnest, candid face is) and masculine; his hair
was reddish-brown and his eye bright-blue. He was costumed in the
deerskin cap, leggings, moccasins, and leathern shirt common to the
western hunter. "You seem tickled wi' the Injuns, Dick Varley," said a
man who at that moment issued from the blockhouse.

"That's just what I am, Joe Blunt," replied the youth, turning with a
broad grin to his companion.

"Have a care, lad; do not laugh at 'em too much. They soon take
offence; an' them Redskins never forgive."