"Why?"
"For leaving my rifle in the first place, and for rotten shooting in the second," he replied seriously. "I should have stopped him, and so I would if I had taken my time about it. I guess I got rattled."
"Is that your trouble?" she laughed. "The bear is simply riddled with bullets."
"Is that so?" he returned with obvious pleasure. "Tell me what happened."
"I stopped running when you fired the first shot," she said. "You and the bear seemed to go down together, and he rolled clean over you. It was only in his last flurry that he threw himself across your legs."
"Lucky he didn't claw me up in that flurry. He was a tough old boy."
"If you had been killed it would have been my fault," she said seriously. "You were quite safe, and you attacked him to save me."
"I would have come down, anyway, the first chance he gave me to get hold of my rifle."
"It was stupid of me," she persisted. "At first, you see, I couldn't believe there was a bear. I thought you were trying to frighten me. And then I just couldn't catch that pony. I'm not used to horses, I'm afraid."
Now, as she spoke, something in her voice struck a chord in Angus' recollection. Where had he heard that faint lisp, that slurring of the sibilants? For a moment he puzzled, groping for an elusive memory. And then suddenly it leaped at him out of the one day, years before, whose happenings, even the least of them, he never forgot. And he saw a little girl, frightened but trying to be brave, and a lanky boy confronting her with a rifle.