Notwithstanding Captain Jackson had taken what he considered to be the best of the two Rosinantes for himself. Gerald had no reason to deny the character for kind-heartedness given of him by Colonel Forrester. Frequently when winding through some dense forest, or moving over some extensive plain where nothing beyond themselves told of the existence of man, his companion would endeavor to divert him from the abstraction and melancholy in which he was usually plunged, and, ascribing his melancholy to an unreal cause, seek to arouse him by the consolatory assurance that he was not the first man who had been taken prisoner--adding that there was no use in snivelling, as "what was done couldn't be undone, and no great harm neither, as there was some as pretty gals in Kaintuck as could be picked out in a day's ride; and that to a good-looking young fellow like himself, with nothing to do but make love to them, _that_ ought to be no mean consideration, enabling him, as it would, to while away the tedium of captivity." At other times he would launch forth into some wild rhapsody, the invention of the moment, or seek to entertain his companion with startling anecdotes connected with his encounters with the Indians on the Wabash, (where he had formerly served) in the course of which much of the marvellous, to call it by the most indulgent term, was necessarily mixed up--not perhaps that he was quite sensible of this himself, but because he possessed a constitutional proneness to exaggeration that rendered him even more credulous of the good things he uttered than those to whom he detailed them.