"
This apparently studied reticence only incited my curiosity to learn
something more of the man for whom I had begun to have a real affection.
I wanted particularly to know something of his life before he came to
Marvin's!--twelve years now. I could not, of course, ask Marvin or his
wife for any details--my intimacy with Jim forbade such an invasion of
his privacy--and I met no one else in the forest. I saw plainly that he
was not a mountaineer by birth. Not only did his dialect differ from
those about him, but his habits were not those of a woodsman. For
instance, he would always carry his matches loose in his pocket, instead
of in a dry box; then, again, he would wear his trousers rolled up like
a fireman's, as if to keep out the wet, instead of tucking them into his
boots to tramp the woods the better. Now and then, too, he would let
fall some word or expression which would betray greater familiarity with
the ins and outs of the city than with the intricacies of the forest.
"It was fixed up in a glass case like one Abe Condit used to have in his
place in the Bowery," he said once in describing a prize trout some city
fisherman had stuffed and framed.
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