"Rufus!" she exclaimed, breaking away from me, "You're not a sensible man at all."
"Never said I was," I returned.
"If you do that," she answered, ignoring my remark and receding farther, "I'll never stop crying."
"Then cry on forever!"
With womanly ingratitude, she promptly called me "a goose" and other irrelevant names.
The rest of our talk that evening I do not intend to set down. In the first place, it was best understood by only two. In the second, it could not be transcribed; and in the third, it was all a deal too sacred.
We did, however, become impersonal for short intervals.
"I feel as if there were some storm in the air," said Frances Sutherland. "The half-breeds are excited. They are riding past the settlement in scores every day. O, Rufus, I know something is wrong."
"So do I," was my rejoinder. I was thinking of the strange gossip of the Assiniboine encampment.
"Do you think the Bois-Brulés would plunder your boats?" she asked innocently, ignorant that the malcontents were Nor'-Westers.