"Oh," said the elder Bruce, "thar's no reggelar commission in the case.
But whar thar's a knot of our poor folks out of horses, and inclined to
steal a lot from the Shawnees (which is all fa'r plundering, you see, for
thar's not a horse among them, the brutes, that they did not steal from
Kentucky), they send for Roaring Ralph and make him their captain; and a
capital one he is, too, being all fight from top to bottom; and as for
the stealing part, thar's no one can equal him. But, as Tom says, he
sometimes _does_ make mistakes, having stolen horses so often from the
Injuns, he can scarce keep his hands off a Christian's, and that makes us
wrathy."

By this time the speakers had reached the gate of the fort, and passed
among the cabins outside, where they found a throng of the villagers,
surrounding the captain of horse-thieves, and listening with great
edification to, and deriving no little amusement from, his account of the
last achievement of the Jibbenainosay. Of this, as it related no more
than the young Bruce had already repeated,--namely, that, while riding
that morning from the north side, he had stumbled upon the corse of an
Indian, which bore all the marks of having been a late victim to the
wandering demon of the woods,--we shall say nothing; but the appearance
and conduct of the narrator, one of the first, and perhaps the parent,
of the race of men who have made Salt River so renowned in story, were
such as to demand a less summary notice. He was stout, bandy-legged,
broad-shouldered, and bull-headed, ugly, and villanous of look; yet with
an impudent, swaggering, joyous self-esteem traced in every feature and
expressed in every action of body, that rather disposed the beholder to
laugh than to be displeased at his appearance. An old blanket-coat, or
wrap-rascal, once white, but now of the same muddy brown hue that stained
his visage--and once also of sufficient length to defend his legs, though