When the ship returned the crew found the
living comrade an old man with hair as white as snow, and never in his
life afterward was he seen to smile.
These stories stirred my emotions like Doyle's tale about Jones' Ranch.
How wonderful, beautiful, terrible and tragical is human life! Again I
heard the still, sad music of humanity, the eternal beat and moan of the
waves upon a lonely shingle shore. Who would not be a teller of tales?
Copple followed Nielsen with a story about a prodigious feat of his
own--a story of incredible strength and endurance, which at first I took
to be a satire on Nielsen's remarkable narrative. But Copple seemed
deadly serious, and I began to see that he possessed a strange
simplicity of exaggeration. The boys thought Copple stretched the truth
a little, but I thought that he believed what he told.
Haught was a great teller of tales, and his first story of the evening
happened to be about his brother Bill. They had a long chase after a
bear and became separated. Bill was new at the game, and he was a
peculiar fellow anyhow. Much given to talking to himself! Haught finally
rode to the edge of a ridge and espied Bill under a pine in which the
hounds had treed a bear. Bill did not hear Haught's approach, and on the
moment he was stalking round the pine, swearing at the bear, which clung
to a branch about half way up.
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