"If Old Tom has taken to a new calling, and has been trying his
hand at the traps," cried Hurry, who had been coolly examining the
borderer's implements; "if that is his humor, and you're disposed
to remain in these parts, we can make an oncommon comfortable season
of it; for, while the old man and I out-knowledge the beaver, you
can fish, and knock down the deer, to keep body and soul together.
I've always give the poorest hunters half a share, but one as actyve
and sartain as yourself might expect a full one."

"Thank'ee, Hurry; thank'ee, with all my heart--but I do a little
beavering for myself as occasions offer. 'Tis true, the Delawares
call me Deerslayer, but it's not so much because I'm pretty fatal
with the venison as because that while I kill so many bucks and
does, I've never yet taken the life of a fellow-creatur'. They
say their traditions do not tell of another who had shed so much
blood of animals that had not shed the blood of man."

"I hope they don't account you chicken-hearted, lad! A faint-hearted
man is like a no-tailed beaver."

"I don't believe, Hurry, that they account me as out-of the-way
timorsome, even though they may not account me as out-of-the-way
brave. But I'm not quarrelsome; and that goes a great way towards
keeping blood off the hands, among the hunters and red-skins; and
then, Harry March, it keeps blood off the conscience, too."

"Well, for my part I account game, a red-skin, and a Frenchman as
pretty much the same thing; though I'm as onquarrelsome a man, too,
as there is in all the colonies. I despise a quarreller as I do a
cur-dog; but one has no need to be over-scrupulsome when it's the