"
"Hold on! hold on!" Tom bellowed, "you are the darndest critter, when
you do git goin--now hold on, do--I wants some rum, and Forester here
looks a kind of white about the gills, his what-d'ye-call, cheeroot, has
made him sick, I reckon!"
Of course, with such an exhortation in our ears as this, it was
impossible to do otherwise than wet our whistles with one drop of the
old Ferintosh; and then, Tom having once again recovered his good humor,
away we went, and "clombe the high hill," though we "swam not the deep
river," as merrily as ever sportsman did, from the days of Arbalast and
Longbow, down to these times of Westley Richards' caps and Eley's wire
cartridges.
A tramp of fifteen minutes through some scrubby brushwood, brought us to
the base of a steep stony ridge covered with tall and thrifty hickories
and a few oaks and maples intermixed, rising so steeply from the shore
that it was necessary not only to strain every nerve of the leg, but to
swing our bodies up from tree to tree, by dint of hand. It was indeed a
hard and heavy tug; and I had pretty tough work, what between the
exertion of the ascent, and the incessant fits of laughter into which I
was thrown by the grotesquely agile movements of fat Tom; who, grunting,
panting, sputtering, and launching forth from time to time the strangest
and most blasphemously horrid oaths, contrived to make way to the summit
faster than either of us--crashing through the dense underwood of
juniper and sumac, uprooting the oak saplings as he swung from this to
that, and spurning down huge stones upon us, as we followed at a
cautious distance.
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