“Are you makin’ fun of my hair?” she demanded.
“Why, no. Certainly not. What made you think that?”
“Oh, everybody does. They say Nigger Nat don’t need a lamp with my red-head there into the house, and anybody that meets me onto the road says he thought ’twas a forest-fire comin’, and—oh, I’m sick of it! I thought mebbe you wanted to be funny the same way when you said you couldn’t see past me.”
“No, no. It was a poor joke, but I didn’t mean it that way.” He dropped beside her, laying his gun beside his right leg. “Don’t let folks bother you. Chances are that they’d give anything to have hair like yours—the women, anyway—but because they can’t have it they make fun of it. It’s the way of the world. What’s this?”
His hand lifted the forgotten paper and board from her lap. She snatched at it.
“Gimme that!”
“Not yet.” He jerked it aside and held it out of reach. “Why, it’s a sketch! Let’s see—here’s the creek, and——”
She threw herself at him, her cheeks burning, her hands struggling to seize the paper.
“You gimme that!” she blazed. “’Tain’t no good—don’t you look at it!”
But he laughed and stretched his long right arm to its longest, holding the paper a yard from her.