"It's bad," said the father, as he filled his pipe again, after supper. "Quarreled with Lumsden! He'll drive us off. We'll all take the fever"--for every evil that Job Goodwin thought of immediately became inevitable, in his imagination--"we'll all take the fever, and have to make a new settlement in winter time." Saying this, Goodwin took his pipe out of his mouth, rested his elbow on his knee, and his head on his hand, diligently exerting his imagination to make real and vivid the worst possible events conceivable from this new and improved stand-point of despair. But the wise mother set herself to planning; and when eight o'clock had come, and Job Goodwin had forgotten the fever, having fallen into a doze in his shuck-bottom chair, Mrs. Goodwin told Morton that the best thing for him and Kike would be to get out of the settlement until the captain should have time to cool off. "Kike ought to be got away before he does anything desperate. We want some meat for winter; and though it's a little early yet, you'd better start off with Kike in the morning," she said. Always fond of hunting, anxious now to drown pain and forebodings in some excitement, Morton did not need a second suggestion from his mother. He feared bad results from Kike's temper; and though he had little hope of any relenting on Lumsden's part, he had an eager desire to forget his trouble in a chase after bears and deer. He seized his cap, saddled and mounted Dolly, and started at once to the house of Kike's mother. Soon after Morton went, his father woke up, and, finding his son gone out, complained, as he got ready for bed, that the boy would "ketch the fever, certain, runnin' 'round that away at night." [Illustration: THE IRISH SCHOOL-MASTER.] Morton found Kike in a state of exhaustion--pale, angry, and sick. Mr. Brady, the Irish school-master, from whom the boys had received most of their education and many a sound whipping, was doing his best to divert Kike from his revengeful mood. It is a singular fact in the history of the West, that so large a proportion of the first school-masters were Irishmen of uncertain history. "Ha! Moirton, is it you?" said Brady. "I'm roight glad to see ye. Here's this b'y says hay'd a shot his own uncle as shore as hay'd a toiched him with his roidin'-fwhip. An' I've been a-axin ov him fwoi hay hain't blowed out me brains a dozen times, sayin' oive lathered him with baich switches. I didn't guiss fwat a saltpayter kag hay wuz, sure. Else I'd a had him sarched for foire-arms before iver I'd a venter'd to inform him which end of the alphabet was the bayginnin'. Hay moight a busted me impty pate for tellin' him that A wusn't B." It was impossible for Morton to keep from smiling at the good old fellow's banter. Brady was bent on mollifying Kike, who was one of his brightest and most troublesome pupils, standing next to Patty and Morton in scholarship though much younger.