without a break except where the
axe had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but,
nearer or farther, the forest encompassed the town, and it called the
boys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by its
shore, with mysterious, alluring voices, kindling the blood, taking the
soul with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy's
Town who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in the
woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off
the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture.
The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of
solitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastes
of the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and if
their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was
because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their
ideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they would
go farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do not
remember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived too
hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented the
marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just as
soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just been
opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon,
where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, while
a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you had
set in the river that ran before the log-cabin.

[Illustration: "ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE."]

If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything
else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were
willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed
mind about them in the meantime, but perhaps they were not unlike other
idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came
pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than
they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and
the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be
British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you
had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some
time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the
c