“With being stuck here,” he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there was something fundamentally wrong with him.
“What makes you feel that way?” I asked, though for a moment I’d been prompted to inquire if they hadn’t let him out a little too soon.
“Because I wouldn’t have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn’t mired herself in this mud-hole,” he had the effrontery to tell me.
“Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?” I asked, deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn’t confronting an untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more pointedly and more impersonally than ever.
“It’s more than consolatory,” he said with an accentuating flourish of the little briar pipe. “It’s quite compensatory.”
It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.
“Do you want to get out of that hole?” I demanded. For it’s a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in distress.
“Not if it means an ending to this interview,” he told me.
It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn’t much warmth in the inspection.
“What are you trying to do?” I calmly inquired, for prairie life hadn’t exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of that stalker known as Man.