him that Oncle Jazon
should know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"

Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrod
to see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the point
of whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.

"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Where
did you and he come together?"

Oncle Jazon chuckled reminiscently and scratched the skinless,
cicatrized spot where his scalp had once flourished.

"Oh, several places," he answered. "Ye see thet hair a hangin' there on
the wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a log
barely visible by the bad light. "Well, thet's my scalp, he! he! he!"
He snickered as if the fact were a most enjoyable joke. "Simon Kenton
can tell ye about thet little affair! The Indians thought I was dead,
and they took my hair; but I wasn't dead; I was just a givin' 'em a
'possum act. When they was gone I got up from where I was a layin' and
trotted off. My head was sore and ventrebleu! but I was mad, he! he!
he!"

All this time he spoke in French, and the English but poorly
paraphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannot
even be hinted.

It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but with
certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous
self-satisfaction:

"Accidents will happen. I got my chance at that damned Indian who
skinned my head, and I jes took a bead on 'im with my old rifle. I
can't shoot much, never could, but I happened to hit 'im square in the
lef' eye, what I shot at, and it was a hundred yards. Down he tumbles,
and I runs to 'im and finds my same old scalp a hangin' to his belt.
Well, I lifted off his hair with my knife, and untied mine from the
belt, and then I had both scalps, he! he! he! You ask Simon Kenton when
ye see 'im. He was along at the same time, and they made 'im run the
ga'ntlet and pretty nigh beat the life out o' 'im. Ventrebleu!"

Beverley now recollected hearing Kenton tell the same grim story by a
camp-fire in the hills of Kentucky. Somehow it had caught a new spirit
in the French rendering, which linked it with the old tales of
adventure that he had read in his boyhood, and it suddenly endeared
Oncle Jazon to him. The rough old scrap of a man and the powerful youth
chatted together until sundown, smoking their pipes, each feeling for
what was best in the other, half a