which could yield the nourishment sufficiently strengthening for certain
and speedy recuperation. According to Ben's theory, a given quantity of
bear's meat, for example, afforded some ten or twelve times as much
nourishment as an equal quantity of squirrel's meat.

That day a fat, young bear fell a sacrifice to Ben's physiological
heresy; the next day a fat, young buck; a lordly buffalo on the third,
and so on, and so on, for more than a week, with a smart sprinkling of
squirrels and birds looking to the special wants of the doctors and
nurses. Every morning he would furnish the squirrel or bird required of
him; which, having done by way of compromise between his better judgment
and his duty as a son, then away to the lick would he hie himself on his
own responsibility for something better worth a hunter's notice. The
good fellow had evidently taken Sprigg's case into his own hands, under
an abiding conviction that nothing less than an heroic course of wild
meat could bring it to a happy issue. Thus, while he was devoting all
his powers of body and mind, and the shiny parts of a fortnight to the
sustenance of one little sick boy, young Ben Logan had well nigh
foundered the whole settlement on wild meat--the backbones, tongues and
spareribs themselves being enough to surfeit the fort, consisting,
though it did, of some ten or twelve families, all well stocked with
children and dogs.

How could poor Sprigg have ever imagined that a pair of red moccasins,
or anything else, indeed, which might be named as very attractive to
juvenile fancy, could stir up envy, to the dying extent, or to any
extent whatever, in the simple, unselfish heart of his friend Ben? Ben
would have admired the moccasins exceedingly; pronounced them beautiful,
fine enough for the son of a Shawnee Sachem; fine enough, indeed, for
Nick of the Woods himself; but to envy Sprigg for his finery would no
more have entered his thoughts than to envy a redbird for his tail
feathers, or a red man for his head feathers. Ben could have put those
Manitou moccasins on and worn them whithersoever he pleased, and his
guileless feet been as easy and safe in them as had they been shod with
unenchanted, merchantable, split-leather, Yankee shoes. Ben could have
followed the chase in those moccasins day after day, till he had rubbed
and kicked them bare of all their gaudy heads; till he had snagged them
full of holes and covered them over with barbarous patches of his own