"Shucks! I say babyfied. Waal—all you uns goin' ter the show, an' hyar I be 'feared ter stir,—hid up hyar in a hole in the rocks like a wolf or a painter an' ez ef thar war a bounty on my skelp."
"'Tain't but fur a week—less 'n a week," she urged.
"You uns don't keer—else ye wouldn't go," he said, dropping his voice, and all his heart was in his eyes as he looked down at her.
She had her moments of perspicacity. "Then I won't go," she said, with the facile self-abnegation of one who knows that the tendered sacrifice will not be accepted.
He suddenly came from his negligent posture to the perpendicular, tense and nervous. "Naw, naw—I don't want that nuther," he protested as she had expected.
"I 'lows ye don't rightly know whut 'tis ye do want!" she declared with an air of flouting impatience.
"Yes, I do too—but I couldn't abide ez ye should miss seein' the show—an' mebbe later in the week I'll slip down, too."
A genuinely serious look usurped the feignings of her face. "Better mind, Eujeemes," she admonished him, "ye mought meet the sher'ff face ter face in the street. He be well acquainted with you uns—ye hev tole me that!" She nodded her head with an expression of dreary foreboding.
"Waal," he said desperately, but evidently faint-hearted, "I could leave it ter men."
She looked at him in rising irritation, half minded to withhold the remonstrance that she knew he pined to hear. His own sense of prudence made him yearn for an urgency of caution. But she was yet vibrating with the unwonted excitements of the afternoon, yet aglow with the realisation of an admiration all unaccustomed in its expression and its subject. She was well aware that she had been considered a "powerful pretty gal" throughout the countryside, and though the small distorted surface of a cheap mirror afforded no adequate reflection of her beauty, it was well-pleasing to her untutored eye, and was called into frequent consultation. But this popular repute was an homage shared by a dozen other mountain nymphs, and in more than one instance she was surpassed in public esteem chiefly on account of the tint of her red hair and the tiny freckles here and there marring the exquisite fairness of her face, despite all that baths of buttermilk and May dew could compass.