The Englishman turned to me. "Will you conduct me to the shore? I will take Pierre's place."
It was my turn to stare. "Suppose you conduct yourself," was on my tongue, but I let it escape unsaid. "Come, then," I answered, with a shrug.
I led the way over logs and under bushes, and the Englishman followed silently; silently at least as to his tongue, but his feet were garrulous. They stepped on twigs, stumbled on slippery lichen, and shouted their passage for rods around.
"I would rather lead a buffalo in tether," I fretted, and just as I said it he completed the sum of his blundering by catching his toe in a root and plunging head foremost to the ground. I pulled him up by the sleeve of his skin blouse and shook him free from loam and twigs.
"Now will you stop that?" I cried.
He looked at me gravely, unabashed, but curious. "I did not fall purposely to irritate you. Gravity, which, I understand, operates alike on the learned and the foolish, had some share in it. Why are you angry?"
"Why are you reckless? You have crashed through here as careless of noise as a stag with the hounds hot behind."
He dropped to the ground, and took one slim moccasined foot in his hand. He looked at it soberly. "It seems a small thing, does it not, to cause so much ill-will between us? It has neither weight nor mental force above it, that it should make the earth tremble. No, monsieur, you are searching for excuses for your annoyance with me. You are annoyed all the time. I vex you by my silence, still more by my speech. We are to be some time together, and I do not want to be a constant canker. Is it not possible for you to forget me, to ignore me?"
I saw he was in earnest. "And so you really do not know what irritated me? Are you so little of a woodsman?"
"I have never traveled through the woods."