Possibly the stag could not satisfy himself as to the identity of the youth, for after a prolonged stare he swung back his head and slouched off toward the woods. Jud raised his breech-loader and took careful aim at the head held so proudly aloft. The finger was pressing the trigger, when the rifle was lowered again.
“We’ll call it square; you’ve saved your life; you may go; good-by!”
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MY young friends Jim and Joe Allison are emphatic in declaring that they will never, never forget their adventure in Florida last summer. When you come to learn the particulars, I am sure you will take the same view of it that they do.
Jim and Joe are brothers, the first sixteen and the second fourteen years old. Last autumn they came to the north to attend school, and perhaps some of the readers of boys’ papers have made their acquaintance. If so, you will agree with me that they are bright, manly fellows, who, if their lives are spared, will become useful and popular citizens.
The father of the Allison boys was an officer of the Confederacy. With the wreck of a once handsome fortune, he went back to his old home in Florida, after the close of the war. He was still a young man, and had been fortunate enough to go through the whole “unpleasantness” without a scratch. He married an estimable lady from the north, who, in addition to her many fine qualities, had the not objectionable one of considerable wealth. So it came about that Colonel Allison bought a fine orange plantation in the land of flowers, and it was there that his daughter and two sons were born.
Like the boys of the south and west, Jim and Joe were accustomed to horses, guns and roughing it from earliest boyhood, though rather curiously neither of them could swim a stroke. They spent many an hour in the pulseless pine forests, in the oozy swamps and the dry barrens, finding enjoyment and sport where you and I would see nothing but wretchedness.
Only a few weeks before they went to the north they engaged in the memorable hunt of which I am going to tell you. Suspecting that it would be the last one they would be able to have together for a long time (for they were busy with their preparations for leaving home), they agreed to make it a thorough one so far as it was in their power to do so.