“If you do,” she threatened, “I shall have to scold you harder than I did yesterday.”
He sank back, a look in his face of mingled chagrin and wonder. Helen was arrayed in white, the simplest sort of a shirt-waist suit, with a touch of brown at neck and belt and shoes; but to his bewildered senses she was a radiant vision of unguessed daintiness and beauty. There was something incredible, to him, in the idea of this unearthly being offering him food. He glanced from her to the tray, and back again.
“I don’t know what that is,” he said, indicating the grape-fruit, “and I ain’t sure I know what you are. I thought yesterday you were a little girl, and now you seem like a young lady; and I don’t seem right sure you won’t turn into a fairy in a minute, and run away.”
“Oh, Oh!” Helen cried, “What three-fold flattery!”
Then it was her turn to experience a shock; for, as she stood looking down upon him, it suddenly became apparent to her that this man was young.
She had thought nothing about the matter, in the excitement of yesterday’s encounter, and when she had walked beside him, seeing his bearded face in her brief, upward glances, she had taken it for granted that he was middle-aged, at least. There was something disconcerting about the unexpected revelation of youth in those eager brown eyes, in the clear olive of the face above the strong, short beard, and in the firm curve of red lips just visible under the moustache. She could think of no further retort to his pretty speech, and busied herself with showing him how to eat the grape-fruit, wondering, vaguely, where he could have been, in the desert, not to have encountered pomelos.
“These are from over the border,” she explained. “One of the boys smuggled them in last week; think how wicked we are! But by New Year’s we shall have some of our very own.”
“They’re mighty good,” Gard said, with no idea of what the fruit tasted like. He was still wrestling with the awesome fact that Helen had prepared it, and was teaching him to eat it. He took more sugar when she told him to, though years of abstinence from sugar had blunted his taste for it, and he shook his head with very proper commiseration when she told him of the way eastern folk spoil the fruit in preparing it.
“I never was back there,” he said, “I was raised on the prairie; but this is good enough for me.”
He looked beyond the fringe of cottonwoods, out across the plain, quivering in the mid-forenoon heat.