As might have been expected, this continued interruption attracted the attention of every one in the cabin; all conversation dropped, and in the midst of this surprise, the “Big Bar” walked into the cabin, took a chair, put his feet on the stove, and looking back over his shoulder, passed the general and familiar salute of “Strangers, how are you?” He then expressed himself as much at home as if he had been at “the Forks of Cypress,” and “prehaps a little more so.”
There was something about the intruder that won the heart on sight. He appeared to be a man enjoying perfect health and contentment: his eyes were as sparkling as diamonds, and good-natured to simplicity. Then his perfect confidence in himself was irresistibly droll.
“Prehaps,” said he, “gentlemen,” running on without a person speaking, “prehaps you have been to New Orleans often; I never made _the first visit before_, and I don’t intend to make another in a crow’s life. I am thrown away in that ar place, and useless, that ar a fact. Some of the gentlemen thar called me _green_—well, prehaps I am, said I, _but I arn’t so at home_; and if I ain’t off my trail much, the heads of them perlite chaps themselves wern’t much the hardest; for according to my notion, they were _real know-nothings_, green as a pumpkin-vine—couldn’t, in farming, I’ll bet, raise a crop of turnips: and as for shooting, they’d miss a barn if the door was swinging, and that, too, with the best rifle in the country. And then they talked to me ’bout hunting, and laughed at my calling the principal game in Arkansaw, poker, and high-low-jack.
“‘Prehaps,’ said I, ‘you prefer chickens and rolette;’ at this they laughed harder than ever, and asked me if I lived in the woods, and didn’t know what _game_ was? At this I rather think I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I roared, and says, ‘Strangers, if you’d asked me _how we got our meat_ in Arkansaw, I’d a told you at once, and given you a list of varmints that would make a caravan, beginning with the bar, and ending off with the cat; that’s _meat_ though, not game.’
“Game, indeed, that’s what city folks call it; and with them it means chippen-birds and bitterns; maybe such trash live in my diggins, but I arn’t noticed them yet: a bird any way is too trifling. I never did shoot at but one, and I’d never forgiven myself for that, had it weighed less than forty pounds. I wouldn’t draw a rifle on anything less than that; and when I meet with another wild turkey of the same weight I’ll drap him.”