A kind and a sweet girl I have ever found Nell
Wade to be!"
"The devil you have!" cried Paul, dropping the morsel he was sucking,
from sheer reluctance to abandon the hump, and casting a fierce and
direct look into the very teeth of the unconscious physician. "I
reckon, stranger, you have a mind to bag Ellen, too!"
"The riches of the whole vegetable and animal world united, would not
tempt me to harm a hair of her head! I love the child, with what may
he called amor naturalis--or rather paternus--the affection of a
father."
"Ay--that, indeed, is more befitting the difference in your years,"
Paul coolly rejoined, stretching forth his hand to regain the rejected
morsel. "You would be no better than a drone at your time of day, with
a young hive to feed and swarm."
"Yes, there is reason, because there is natur', in what he says,"
observed the trapper: "but, friend, you have said you were a dweller
in the camp of one Ishmael Bush?"
"True; it is in virtue of a compactum--"
"I know but little of the virtue of packing, though I follow trapping,
in my old age, for a livelihood.
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