daintily she was with the lace handkerchief I'd give her that cost me
twelve fifty.

"Mr. D. took it all like a real man. He said her ignorance of a horse
was adorable and laughed heartily at it. And he smiled in a deeply
modest and masterful way and said 'But, really, that's nothing--nothing
at all, I assure you,' when she said about how he was a corking
athlete--and then kept still to see if she was going on to say more
about it. But she didn't, having the God-given wisdom to leave him
wanting. And then he would be laughing again at her poor-little-me horse
talk.

"I never had a minute's doubt after that, for it was the eyes of one
fascinated to a finish that he turned back on me half an hour later as
he says: 'Really, Mrs. Pettengill, our Miss Hester is feminine to her
finger tips, is she not?' 'She is, she is,' I answers. 'If you only knew
the trouble I had with the chit about that horrible old riding skirt of
hers when all her girl friends are wearing a sensible costume!' Hetty
blushed good and proper at this, not knowing how indecent I might
become, and Mr. D. caught her at it. Aggie Tuttle and Stella Ballard at
this minute is pretending to be shooting up a town with the couple of
revolvers they'd brought along in their cunning little holsters. Mr. D.
turns his glazed eyes to me once more. 'The real womanly woman,' says he
in a hushed voice, 'is God's best gift to man.' Just like that.

"'Landed!' I says to myself. 'Throw him up on the bank and light a
fire.'

"And mebbe you think this tet-a-tet had not been noticed by the merry
throng up front. Not so. The shouting and songs had died a natural
death, and the last three miles of that trail was covered in a gloomy
silence, except for the low voices of Hetty and the male she had so
neatly pronged. I could see puzzled glances cast back at them and catch
mutterings of bewilderment where the trail would turn on itself. But the
poor young things didn't yet realize that their prey was hanging back
there for reasons over which he hadn't any control. They thought, of
course, he was just being polite or something.

"When we got to the picnic place, though, they soon saw that all was not
well. There was some resumption of the merrymaking as they dismounted
and the girls put one stirrup over the saddle-horn and eased the cinch
like the boys did, and proud of their knowledge, but the glances they
now shot at Hetty wasn't bewildered any more. They was glances of pure
fr