The Best Ballantyne Westerns. R. M. Ballantyne

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      CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

       Table of Contents

      The winter packet—Harry hears from old friends, and wishes that he was with them.

      Letters from home! What a burst of sudden emotion—what a riot of conflicting feelings, of dread and joy,—expectation and anxiety—what a flood of old memories—what stirring up of almost forgotten associations these three words create in the hearts of those who dwell in distant regions of this earth, far, far away from kith and kin, from friends and acquaintances, from the much-loved scenes of childhood, and from home! Letters from home! How gratefully the sound falls upon ears that have been long unaccustomed to sounds and things connected with home, and so long accustomed to wild, savage sounds, that these have at length lost their novelty, and become everyday and commonplace, while the first have gradually grown strange and unwonted. For many long months home and all connected with it have become a dream of other days, and savage-land a present reality. The mind has by degrees become absorbed by surrounding objects—objects so utterly unassociated with or unsuggestive of any other land, that it involuntarily ceases to think of the scenes of childhood with the same feelings that it once did. As time rolls on, home assumes a misty, undefined character, as if it were not only distant in reality, but were also slowly retreating farther and farther away—growing gradually faint and dream-like, though not less dear, to the mental view.

      “Letters from home!” shouted Mr Wilson, and the doctor, and the skipper, simultaneously, as the sportsmen, after dashing through the wild storm, at last reached the fort, and stumbled tumultuously into Bachelors’ Hall.

      “What!—Where!—How!—You don’t mean it!” they exclaimed, coming to a sudden stand, like three pillars of snow-clad astonishment.

      “Ay,” replied the doctor, who affected to be quite cool upon all occasions, and rather cooler than usual if the occasion was more than ordinarily exciting—“ay, we do mean it. Old Rogan has got the packet, and is even now disembowelling it.”

      “More than that,” interrupted the skipper, who sat smoking as usual by the stove, with his hands in his breeches pockets—“more than that, I saw him dissecting into the very marrow of the thing; so if we don’t storm the old admiral in his cabin, he’ll go to sleep over these prosy yarns that the governor-in-chief writes to him, and we’ll have to whistle for our letters till midnight.”

      The skipper’s remark was interrupted by the opening of the outer door and the entrance of the butler. “Mr Rogan wishes to see you, sir,” said that worthy to the accountant.

      “I’ll be with him in a minute,” he replied, as he threw off his capote and proceeded to unwind himself as quickly as his multitudinous haps would permit.

      By this time Harry Somerville and Hamilton were busily occupied in a similar manner, while a running fire of question and answer, jesting remark and bantering reply, was kept up between the young men, from their various apartments and the hall. The doctor was cool, as usual, and impudent. He had a habit of walking up and down while he smoked, and was thus enabled to look in upon the inmates of the several sleeping-rooms, and make his remarks in a quiet, sarcastic manner, the galling effect of which was heightened by his habit of pausing at the end of every two or three words, to emit a few puffs of smoke. Having exhausted a good deal of small talk in this way, and having, moreover, finished his pipe, the doctor went to the stove to refill and relight.

      “What a deal of trouble you do take to make yourself comfortable!” said he to the skipper, who sat with his chair tilted on its hind legs, and a pillow at his back.

      “No harm in that, doctor,” replied the skipper, with a smile.

      “No harm, certainly, but it looks uncommonly lazy-like.”

      “What does?”

      “Why, putting a pillow at your back, to be sure.”

      The doctor was a full-fleshed, muscular man, and owing to this fact it mattered little to him whether his chair happened to be an easy one or not. As the skipper sometimes remarked, he carried padding always about with him; he was, therefore, a little apt to sneer at the attempts of his brethren to render the ill-shaped, wooden-bottomed chairs, with which the hall was ornamented, bearable.

      “Well, doctor,” said the skipper, “I cannot see how you make me out lazy. Surely it is not an evidence of laziness my endeavouring to render these instruments of torture less tormenting? Seeking to be comfortable, if it does not inconvenience any one else, is not laziness. Why, what is comfort?” The skipper began to wax philosophical at this point, and took the pipe from his mouth as he gravely propounded the momentous question. “What is comfort? If I go out to camp in the woods, and after turning in find a sharp stump sticking into my ribs on one side, and a pine root driving in the small of my back on the other side, is that comfort? Certainly not. And if I get up, seize a hatchet, level the stump, cut away the root, and spread pine brush over the place, am I to be called lazy for doing so? Or if I sit down on a chair, and on trying to lean back to rest myself find that the stupid lubber who made it has so constructed it that four small hard points alone touch my person—two being at the hip-joints and two at the shoulder-blades; and if to relieve such physical agony I jump up and clap a pillow at my back, am I to be called lazy for doing that?”

      “What a glorious entry that would make in the log!” said the doctor, in a low tone, soliloquisingly, as if he made the remark merely for his own satisfaction, while he tapped the ashes out of his pipe.

      The skipper looked as if he meditated a sharp reply; but his intentions, whatever they might have been, were interrupted by the opening of the door, and the entrance of the accountant, bearing under his arm a packet of letters.

      A general rush was made upon him, and in a few minutes a dead silence reigned in the hall, broken only at intervals by an exclamation of surprise or pathos, as the inmates, in the retirement of their separate apartments, perused letters from friends in the interior of the country and friends at home: letters that were old—some of them bearing dates many months back—and travel-stained, but new and fresh and cheering, nevertheless, to their owners, as the clear, bright sun in winter or the verdant leaves in spring.

      Harry Somerville’s letters were numerous and long. He had several from friends in Red River, besides one or two from other parts of the Indian country, and one—it was very thick and heavy—that bore the post-marks of Britain. It was late that night ere the last candle was extinguished in the hall, and it was late, too, before Harry Somerville ceased to peruse and re-peruse the long letter from home, and found time or inclination to devote to his other correspondents.