“I’m trying to figure out,” he just as calmly retorted, apparently quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, “how anything as radiant and lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and coyotes.”
The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.
“And I’m still trying to figure out,” I told him, “how what impresses me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what looks like a first-class car! Unless,” and the thought came to me out of a clear sky, and when they come that way they’re inspirations and are usually true, “unless you stole it!”
He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it from end to end.
“If I’m that far behind Hyacinthe,” he indifferently acknowledged, “I begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn’t been altogether wasted.”
“But you did steal the car?” I persisted.
“That must be a secret between us,” he said, with a distinctly guilty look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs and bloodhounds on his track.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, determined to thrash the thing out, now that it had been thrust upon me.
“Talking to the most charming woman I’ve encountered west of the Great Lakes,” he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile. But I didn’t intend him to draw a herring across the trail.
“I’d be obliged if you’d be sincere,” I told him, sitting up a little straighter on Paddy.