But Again The
Captain's Easy Good-Nature Recoiled From The Task.
The somewhat
vigorous measures necessary to gain the desired result were utterly
repugnant to him; he preferred to pocket his grievances, still
retaining the privilege of grumbling about them.
"Oh, anything for a
quiet life!" he said again, circling back to his favorite maxim.
But to glance at the previous history of our transatlantic
confederates. The captain had sold his commission, and was living in
bachelor ease and dignity in his paternal halls, near Dublin. He
hunted, fished, rode steeple-chases, ran races, and talked of his
former exploits. He was surrounded with the trophies of his rod and
gun; the walls were plentifully garnished, he told us, with moose-
horns and deer-horns, bear-skins, and fox-tails; for the captain's
double-barreled rifle had seen service in Canada and Jamaica; he had
killed salmon in Nova Scotia, and trout, by his own account, in all
the streams of the three kingdoms. But in an evil hour a seductive
stranger came from London; no less a person than R., who, among other
multitudinous wanderings, had once been upon the western prairies,
and naturally enough was anxious to visit them again. The captain's
imagination was inflamed by the pictures of a hunter's paradise that
his guest held forth; he conceived an ambition to add to his other
trophies the horns of a buffalo, and the claws of a grizzly bear; so
he and R. struck a league to travel in company.
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