Love is popularly supposed to dull the mental faculties. It developed in Jacob Brice sudden strategic abilities.
"Thar is them ez does," he said diplomatically.
Cynthia spoke promptly with more vivacity than usual, but in her customary drawl and apparently utterly irrelevantly:—
"I never in all my days see no sech red-headed gal ez that thar Becky Stiles. She's the red-headedest gal ever I see." And Cynthia once more was silent.
Jacob resumed, also irrelevantly:—
"When I goes a-huntin' up yander ter Pine Lick, they is mighty perlite ter me. They ain't never done nothin' agin me, ez I knows on." Then, after a pause of deep cogitation, he added, "Nor hev they said nothin' agin me, nuther."
Cynthia took up her side of the dialogue, if dialogue it could be called, with wonted irrelevancy: "That thar Becky Stiles, she's got the freckledest face—ez freckled ez any turkey-aig" (with an indescribable drawl on the last word).
"They ain't done nothin' agin me," reiterated Jacob astutely, "nor said nothin' nuther—none of 'em."
Cynthia looked hard across the amphitheatre at the distant Great Smoky Mountains shimmering in the hazy September sunlight—so ineffably beautiful, so delicately blue, that they might have seemed the ideal scenery of some impossibly lovely ideal world. Perhaps she was wondering what the unconscious Becky Stiles, far away in those dark woods about Pine Lick, had secured in this life besides her freckled face. Was this the sylvan deity of the young hunter's adoration?
Cynthia took off her sunbonnet to use it for a fan. Perhaps it was well for her that she did so at this moment; it had so entirely concealed her head that her hair might have been the color of Becky Stiles's, and no one the wiser. The dark brown tendrils curled delicately on her creamy forehead; the excitement of the day had flushed her pale cheeks with an unwonted glow; her eyes were alight with their newly kindled fires; the clinging curtain of her bonnet had concealed the sloping curves of her shoulders—altogether she was attractive enough, despite the flare of her yellow dress, and especially attractive to the untutored eyes of Jacob Brice. He relented suddenly, and lost all the advantages of his tact and diplomacy.