“Sorry to see your ride has given you so poor an appetite,” said the settler, with a look expressive of the savage delight he felt in annoying his visitor.  “I reckon that’s rather unsavory stuff you’ve got there, that you can’t eat it without bread.  I say young man”—­addressing Grantham, “can’t you find no appetite neither, that you sit there snorin’, as if you never meant to wake agin.”

Gerald’s head sunk lower on his chest, and his affectation of slumber became more profound.

“Try a drop of this,” said Jackson, offering his canteen, after having drank himself, and with a view to distract attention from his companion.  “You seem to have no liquor in the house, and I take it you require something hot as h-ll, and strong as d—­n——­n, after that ogre like repast of yours.”

The settler seized the can, and raised it to his lips.  It contained some of the fiery whiskey we have already described as the common beverage in most parts of America.  This, all powerful as it was, he drained off as though it had been water, and with the greedy avidity of one who finds himself suddenly restored to the possession of a favorite and long absent drink.

“Hollo, my friend,” exclaimed the angry Aid-de-Camp, who had watched the rapid disappearance of his “travellers best companion,” as he quaintly enough termed it, down the capacious gullet of the settler—­and snatching at the same moment the nearly emptied canteen from his hands.  “I take it, that’s not handsome.  As I’m a true Tennessee man, bred and born, it aint at all hospitable to empty off a pint of raw liquor at a spell, and have not so much as a glass of methiglin to offer in return.  What the hell do you suppose we’re to do tomorrow for drink, during a curst long ride through the wood, and not a house of call till nightfall along the road.”

The settler drew a breath long and heavy in proportion to the draught he had swallowed, and when his lungs had again recovered their play, answered blusteringly, in a voice that betokened incipient intoxication.

“Roar me up a saplin’ Mister, but you’re mighty stingy of the Wabash.  I reckon as how I made you a free offer of my food, and it war’nt no fault of mine if you did’nt choose to take it.  It would only have been relish for relish after all—­and that’s what I call fair swap.”

“Well, no matter,” said Jackson soothingly; “what’s done can’t be undone, therefore I take it its no use argufying —­however, my old cock, when next you got the neck of a canteen of mine, twixt your lips, I hope it may do the cockles of your heart good; that’s all.  But lets hear how you came by them pieces of nigger’s flesh, and how it is you’ve taken it into your head to turn squatter here.  You seem,” glancing around, “to have no sleeping room to spare, and one may as well sit up and chat as have one’s bones bruised to squash on the hard boards.”