The youth referred to was very unlike, in many respects, to what we are accustomed to suppose a backwoods hunter should be.  He did not possess that quiet gravity and staid demeanour which often characterize these men.  True, he was tall and strongly made, but no one would have called him stalwart, and his frame indicated grace and agility rather than strength.  But the point about him which rendered him different from his companions was his bounding, irrepressible flow of spirits, strangely coupled with an intense love of solitary wandering in the woods.  None seemed so well fitted for social enjoyment as he; none laughed so heartily, or expressed such glee in his mischief-loving eye; yet for days together he went off alone into the forest, and wandered where his fancy led him, as grave and silent as an Indian warrior.

After all, there was nothing mysterious in this.  The boy followed implicitly the dictates of nature within him.  He was amiable, straightforward, sanguine, and intensely earnest.  When he laughed, he let it out, as sailors have it, “with a will.”  When there was good cause to be grave, no power on earth could make him smile.  We have called him boy, but in truth he was about that uncertain period of life when a youth is said to be neither a man nor a boy.  His face was good-looking (every earnest, candid face is) and masculine; his hair was reddish-brown and his eye bright-blue.  He was costumed in the deerskin cap, leggings, moccasins, and leathern shirt common to the western hunter.  “You seem tickled wi’ the Injuns, Dick Varley,” said a man who at that moment issued from the blockhouse.

“That’s just what I am, Joe Blunt,” replied the youth, turning with a broad grin to his companion.

“Have a care, lad; do not laugh at ’em too much.  They soon take offence; an’ them Redskins never forgive.”

“But I’m only laughing at the baby,” returned the youth, pointing to the child, which, with a mixture of boldness and timidity, was playing with a pup, wrinkling up its fat visage into a smile when its playmate rushed away in sport, and opening wide its jet-black eyes in grave anxiety as the pup returned at full gallop.

“It ’ud make an owl laugh,” continued young Varley, “to see such a queer pictur’ o’ itself.”

He paused suddenly, and a dark frown covered his face as he saw the Indian woman stoop quickly down, catch the pup by its hind-leg with one hand, seize a heavy piece of wood with the other, and strike it several violent blows on the throat.  Without taking the trouble to kill the poor animal outright, the savage then held its still writhing body over the fire in order to singe off the hair before putting it into the pot to be cooked.

The cruel act drew young Varley’s attention more closely to the pup, and it flashed across his mind that this could be no other than young Crusoe, which neither he nor his companion had before seen, although they had often heard others speak of and describe it.