The man made no reply, but continued whittling, humming, at the same time, the air of “Yankee Doodle.”

“Answer me, Ephraim Giles,” peremptorily resumed his master; “leave off that eternal whittling of yours, if you can, and explain to me your meaning.”

“Etarnal whittling! do you call it, Boss?  I guess it’s no such thing.  No man knows better nor you, that, if I can whittle the smallest stick in creation, I can bring down the stoutest tree as well as ere a fellow in Michigan.  Work is work—­play is play.  It’s only the difference, I reckon, of the axe and the knife.”

“Will you answer my question like a man, and not like a fool, as you are?” shouted the other, stooping, and extending his left hand, the fingers of which he insinuated into the stock already described, while, with a powerful jerk, he both brought the man to his feet, and the blood into his usually cadaverous cheek.

Ephraim Giles, half-throttled, and writhing with pain, made a movement as if he would have used the knife in a much less innocent manner than whittling, but the quick, stern eye of his master, detected the involuntary act, and his hand, suddenly relinquishing its hold of the collar, grasped the wrist of the soldier with such a vice-like pressure, that the fingers immediately opened, and the knife fell upon the hearth.

The violence of his own act, brought Mr. Heywood at once to a sense of the undue severity he had exercised towards his servant, and he immediately said, taking his hand: 

“Ephraim Giles, forgive me, but it was not intended.  Yet, I know not how it is, the few words you spoke just now made me anxious to know what you meant, and I could not repress my impatience to hear your explanation.”

The soldier had never before remarked so much dignity of manner about his Boss, as he termed Mr. Heywood, and this fact, added to the recollection of the severe handling he had just met with, caused him to be a little more respectful in his address.

“Well, I reckon,” he said, picking up his knife, and resuming his whittling, but in a less absorbed manner, “I meant no harm, but merely that Loup Garou can nose an Injin better than ere a one of us.”

“Nose an Indian better than any one of us!  Well, perhaps he can—­he sees them every day, but what has that to do with his whining and growling just now?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Boss, what I mean, more plain-like.  You know that patch of wood borderin’ on the prairie, where you set me to cut, t’other day?”

“I do.  What of that?”

“Well, then, this mornin’ I was cuttin’ down as big an oak as ever grew in Michigan, when, as it went thunderin’ through the branches, with noise enough to scare every buffalo within a day’s hunt, up started, not twenty yards from it’s tip, ten or a dozen or so of Injins, all gruntin’ like pigs, and looking as fierce as so many red devils.  They didn’t look quite pleasant, I calcilate.”