The Young Game-Warden

"I do think in my soul that of all the mean things a white man has to do, hauling wood on a hot day like this is the very meanest."

The speaker was Silas Morgan—a tall, broad-shouldered man, whose tattered garments and snail-like movements proclaimed him to be the very personification of indolence and shiftlessness.

As he spoke, he took off his hat and drew his shirt-sleeve across his dripping forehead, while the lazy old horse, which had pulled the rickety wood-rack up the long, steep hill from the beach, lowered his head, dropped his ears, and fell fast asleep.

The man had two alert and wide-awake companions, and they were a brace of finely-bred Gordon setters, which, after beating the bushes on both sides of the road in the vain effort to put up a grouse or start a hare, now came in, and lay down near the wagon.

They were a sight for a sportsman's eye, and that same sportsman would very naturally ask himself how it came that this poverty-stricken fellow could afford to own dogs that would have won honors at any bench-show in the land.

"Yes, I reckon them dog-brutes air just about nice," Silas said, whenever any inquisitive person propounded this inquiry to him, "and they were given to me for a present by a couple of city shooters who once hired me for a guide. You see, birds of all sorts, and 'specially woodcock, was mighty skeerce that year, but I took 'em where there was a little bunch that I was a saving for my own shooting, and they had the biggest kind of sport. They give me them dogs in consequence of my perliteness to 'em."

There was no one in the neighborhood who could dispute this story, but there were those who took note of the fact that at certain times the dogs disappeared as completely as though they had never existed, and that they were never seen when there were any strange sportsmen in the vicinity.

"The luck that comes to different folks in this world is just a trifle the beatenest thing that I ever heared tell on," continued Silas, leaning heavily upon the wood-rack and fanning his flushed face with his brimless straw hat. "I can think and plan, but it don't bring in no money, like it does for some folks that ain't got nigh as much sense as I have. Now, there's them two setter dogs that was accidentally left on my hands last year! I thought sure that I'd make my everlasting fortune out of them; but if there's been a reward offered for their safe return to their master, I never seen or heared of it. I've tried every way I can think of to make something, so't things in and around my house won't look so sorter peaked and poor, but I'm as fur from hitting the mark now as I was ten year ago. I wish I could think up some way to make a strike, but I can't; and so here goes for that wood-pile. It won't always be as hot as it is to-day. Winter will be here before long, the roads will be blocked with drifts, and if this wood ain't down to the beach directly, me and the ole woman will have to shiver over a bare hearth."