The Wild Man Of The West

CHAPTER ONE.

IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO A MAD HERO, A RECKLESS LOVER, AND A
RUNAWAY HUSBAND--BACKWOODS JUVENILE TRAINING DESCRIBED--THE PRINCIPLES
OF FIGHTING FULLY DISCUSSED, AND SOME VALUABLE HINTS THROWN OUT.

March Marston was mad! The exact state of madness to which March had
attained at the age when we take up his personal history--namely,
sixteen--is uncertain, for the people of the backwoods settlement in
which he dwelt differed in their opinions on that point.

The clergyman, who was a Wesleyan, said he was as wild as a young
buffalo bull; but the manner in which he said so led his hearers to
conclude that he did not think such a state of ungovernable madness to
be a hopeless condition, by any means. The doctor said he was as mad as
a hatter; but this was an indefinite remark, worthy of a doctor who had
never obtained a diploma, and required explanation, inasmuch as it was
impossible to know _how_ mad he considered a hatter to be. Some of the
trappers who came to the settlement for powder and lead, said he was as
mad as a grisly bear with a whooping-cough--a remark which, if true,
might tend to throw light on the diseases to which the grisly bear is
liable, but which failed to indicate to any one, except perhaps
trappers, the extent of young Marston's madness. The carpenter and the
blacksmith of the place--who were fast friends and had a pitched battle
only once a month, or twice at most--agreed in saying that he was as mad
as a wild-cat. In short, every one asserted stoutly that the boy was
mad, with the exception of the women of the settlement, who thought him
a fine, bold, handsome fellow; and his own mother, who thought him a
paragon of perfection, and who held the opinion (privately) that, in the
wide range of the habitable globe there was not another like him--and
she was not far wrong!

Now, the whole and sole reason why March Marston was thus deemed a
madman, was that he displayed an insane tendency, at all times and in
all manners, to break his own neck, or to make away with himself in some
similarly violent and uncomfortable manner.

There was not a fence in the whole countryside that March had not bolted
over at full gallop, or ridden crash through if he could not go over it.
There was not a tree within a circuit of four miles from the top of
which he had not fallen. There was not a pond or pool in the
neighbourhood into which he had not soused at some period of his stormy
juvenile career, and there was not a big boy whom he had not fought and
thrashed--or been thrashed by--scores of times.