Free Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by James Fenimore Cooper

or three of these of ficers, are extinguishers!”
    “I would think no more of such a woman, but turn my mind altogether to the forest; that will not deceive you, being ordered and ruled by a hand that never wavers.”
    “If you know’d Judith, you would see how much easier it is to say this than it would be to do it. Could I bring my mind to be easy about the officers, I would carry the gal off to the Mohawk by force, make her marry me in spite of her whiffling, and leave old Tom to the care of Hetty, his other child, who, if she be not as handsome or as quick-witted as her sister, is much the most dutiful.”
    “Is there another bird in the same nest?” asked Deerslayer, raising his eyes with a species of half-awakened curiosity—“the Delawares spoke to me only of one.”
    “That’s nat‘ral enough, when Judith Hutter and Hetty Hutter are in question. Hetty is only comely, while her sister, I tell thee, boy, is such another as is not to be found atween this and the sea: Judith is as full of wit, and talk, and cunning, as an old Indian orator, while poor Hetty is at the best but ‘compass meant us.’ ”
    “Anan?” inquired, again, the Deerslayer.
    “Why, what the officers call ‘compass meant us,’ which I understand to signify that she means always to go in the right direction, but sometimes doesn’t know how. ‘Compass’ for the p’int, and ‘meant us’ for the intention. No, poor Hetty is what I call on the varge of ignorance, and sometimes she stumbles on one side of the line, and sometimes on t’other.”
    “Them are beings that the Lord has in his ‘special care,” said Deerslayer, solemnly; “for he looks carefully to all who fall short of their proper share of reason. The redskins honor and respect them who are so gifted, knowing that the Evil Spirit delights more to dwell in an artful body, than in one that has no cunning to work upon.”
    “I’ll answer for it, then, that he will not remain long with poor Hetty; for the child is just ‘compass meant us,’ as I have told you. Old Tom has a feeling for the gal, and so has Judith, quick-witted and glorious as she is herself; else would I not answer for her being altogether safe among the sort of men that sometimes meet on the lake shore.”
    “I thought this water an onknown and little-frequented sheet,” observed the Deerslayer, evidently uneasy at the idea of being too near the world.
    “It’s all that, lad, the eyes of twenty white men never having been laid on it; still, twenty true-bred frontiermen—hunters and trappers, and scouts, and the like—can do a deal of mischief if they try. ’T would be an awful thing to me, Deerslayer, did I find Judith married, after an absence of six months!”
    “Have you the gal’s faith, to encourage you to hope otherwise?”
    “Not at all. I know not how it is: I’m good-looking, boy—that much I can see in any spring on which the sun shines—and yet I could not get the hussy to a promise, or even a cordial willing smile, though she will laugh by the hour. If she has dared to marry in my absence, she’ll be like to know the pleasures of widowhood afore she is twenty!”
    “You would not harm the man she has chosen, Hurry, simply because she found him more to her liking than yourself?”
    “Why not? If an inimy crosses my path, will I not beat him out of it! Look at me! am I a man like to let any sneaking, crawling, skin-trader get the better of me in a matter that touches me as near as the kindness of Judith Hutter? Besides, when we live beyond law, we must be our own judges and executioners. 4 And if a man should be found dead in the woods, who is there to say who slew him, even admitting that the colony took the matter in hand and made a stir about it?”
    “If that man should be Judith Hutter’s husband, after what has passed, I might tell enough, at least, to put the colony on the trail.”
    “You!—half-grown, venison-hunting bantling! You dare to think of informing