ight. Hetty, in the first place, had to be lifted off her horse, and
Mr. D. done it in a masterly way to show her what a mere feather she
was in his giant's grasp. Then with her feet on the ground she reeled a
mite, so he had to support her. She grasped his great strong arm firmly
and says: 'It's nothing--I shall be right presently--leave me please, go
and help those other girls.' They had some low, heated language about
his leaving her at such a crisis, with her gripping his arm till I bet
it showed for an hour. But finally they broke and he loosened her
horse's sash, as she kept quaintly calling it, and she recovered
completely and said it had been but a moment's giddiness anyway, and
what strength he had in those arms, and yet could use it so gently, and
he said she was a brave, game little woman, and the picnic was served to
one and all, with looks of hearty suspicion and rage now being shot at
Hetty from every other girl there.

"And now I see that my hunch has been even better than I thought. Not
only does the star male hover about Hetty, cutely perched on a fallen
log with her dainty, gleaming ankles crossed, and looking so fresh and
nifty and feminine, but I'm darned if three or four of the other males
don't catch the contagion of her woman's presence and hang round her,
too, fetching her food of every kind there, feeding her spoonfuls of
Aggie Tuttle's plum preserves, and all like that, one comical thing
after another. Yes, sir; here was Mac Gordon and Riley Hardin and
Charlie Dickman and Roth Hyde, men about town of the younger dancing
set, that had knowed Hetty for years and hardly ever looked at
her--here they was paying attentions to her now like she was some prize
beauty, come down from Spokane for over Sunday, to say nothing of
Mr. D., who hardly ever left her side except to get her another sardine
sandwich or a paper cup of coffee. It was then I see the scientific
explanation of it, like these high-school professors always say that
science is at the bottom of everything. The science of this here was
that they was all devoting themselves to Hetty for the simple reason
that she was the one and only woman there present.

"Of course these girls in their modest Non Plush Ultras didn't get the
scientific secret of this fact. They was still too obsessed with the
idea that they ought to be ogled on account of them by any male beast in
his right senses. But they knew they'd got in wrong somehow. By this
time the