Dorman began to whine. He had never found his divinity in so unlovely a mood. “I want to go now! Dey are too hungry, Be'trice! Looey Sam is goin' to fry my fishes for dinner, to s'prise auntie. Come, Be'trice!”
“Why don't you go with the child, Beatrice? You grow more selfish every day.” Mrs. Lansell could not endure selfishness—in others. “You know he will not give us any peace until you do.”
Dorman instantly proceeded to make good his grandmother's prophecy, and wept so that one could hear him a mile.
“Oh, dear me! Be still, Dorman—your auntie has a headache. Well, get your rod, if you know where it is—which I doubt.” Beatrice flounced out of the hammock and got her hat, one of those floppy white things, fluffed with thin, white stuff, till they look like nothing so much as a wisp of cloud, with ribbons to moor it to her head and keep it from sailing off to join its brothers in the sky.
Down by the creek, where the willows nodded to their own reflections in the still places, it was cool and sweet scented, and Beatrice forgot her grievances, and was not sorry she had come.
(It was at about this time that a tall young fellow, two miles down the coulee, put away his field glass and went off to saddle his horse.)
“Don't run ahead so, Dorman,” Beatrice cautioned. To her had been given the doubtful honor of carrying the baking-powder can of grasshoppers. Even divinities must make themselves useful to man.
“Why, Be'trice?” Dorman swished his rod in unpleasant proximity to his divinity's head.
“Because, honey”—Beatrice dodged—“you might step on a snake, a rattlesnake, that would bite you.”
“How would it bite, Be'trice?”