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.  Jack followed his brother, as a matter of course.  Two weeks on board the Atlantic steamer brought them to Boston; in two weeks more of hard traveling they reached St. Louis, from which a ride of six days carried them to the frontier; and here we found them, in full tide of preparation for their journey.

We had been throughout on terms of intimacy with the captain, but R., the motive power of our companions’ branch of the expedition, was scarcely known to us.  His voice, indeed, might be heard incessantly; but at camp he remained chiefly within the tent, and on the road he either rode by himself, or else remained in close conversation with his friend Wright, the muleteer.  As the captain left the tent that morning, I observed R. standing by the fire, and having nothing else to do, I determined to ascertain, if possible, what manner of man he was.  He had a book under his arm, but just at present he was engrossed in actively superintending the operations of Sorel, the hunter, who was cooking some corn-bread over the coals for breakfast.  R. was a well-formed and rather good-looking man, some thirty years old; considerably younger than the captain.  He wore a beard and mustache of the oakum complexion, and his attire was altogether more elegant than one ordinarily sees on the prairie.  He wore his cap on one side of his head; his checked shirt, open in front, was in very neat order, considering the circumstances, and his blue pantaloons, of the John Bull cut, might once have figured in Bond Street.

“Turn over that cake, man! turn it over, quick!  Don’t you see it burning?”

“It ain’t half done,” growled Sorel, in the amiable tone of a whipped bull-dog.

“It is.  Turn it over, I tell you!”

Sorel, a strong, sullen-looking Canadian, who from having spent his life among the wildest and most remote of the Indian tribes, had imbibed much of their dark, vindictive spirit, looked ferociously up, as if he longed to leap upon his bourgeois and throttle him; but he obeyed the order, coming from so experienced an artist.