Of course this knowledge came to me gradually; but even that first evening, as Van Zandt and Miss Solander passed near us in the waltz, I could see that he was wonderfully taken with his fair partner. For the next few days he was more or less the victim of some little sisterly traps that were set with great tact and amused Northrup and me immensely. Then my young gentleman escaped and made great running, distancing “Buttons,” “The Wafer,” “Balaam's Ass,” and the rest of what Nell called the “fry,” and crowding Hinton closely for what each felt was his life's race for a prize that might be for neither of them. They were a nice, manly, generous pair of rivals, and I never saw either take an unfair advantage of the other. I remember one day I was fishing, when they both rushed down to their boats and started for the island at racing stroke. Just as they were abreast of me Van Zandt, who was leading, broke a rowlock, and Hinton forged ahead; but the moment he saw what had occurred he backed water, tossed Harry an extra rowlock, waited until he had put it in, and then away they went again.
Which was the favored one it was for some time difficult to decide, as the girl was evidently used to a great deal of attention, and accepted it gracefully and even gratefully; but yet somehow as though it was a matter of course. She took many things as matters of course, by the way, among others her beauty, of which she was as little vain as a flower is of its color or perfume, and she labored under the pleasant delusion that men liked her simply because she could dance and ride and row and shoot and play tennis. There was another thing she played beside tennis, and that was the banjo, and it seemed to me that her rich, flexible contralto, the liquid tingle of the banjo and the Spanish words of the song she loved best to sing, made a harmony as soft and sweet as the fragrant, moonlit nights of her Southern home.
Until I read the generous and intelligent praise of the banjo by the gifted pen of America's greatest writer of romance, I had been rather diffident of expressing my liking for this charming instrument, partly because it was rather impressed upon me by my parents, who were a little tinged with Puritanism, that it was low, and partly because a musical friend, whose opinion in matters harmonic I always deferred to, disliked it; but, under the rose, I thought it delicious, and many years ago I used to wander pretty often to a beer garden in New York, where an old darky named Horace touched the strings with a master's hand and drew from them the half sad, half merry, but wholly sweet melodies of his child-hearted race, which always struck some responsive chord in me that no other music ever did.
There was a good deal of musical talent in the three hotels that summer. Miss Solander, Miss Belmont, Hinton and Van Zandt were a capital quartet; Mrs. Robinson was an accomplished pianist and accompanist; a young girl from Troy sang Irish songs to a zither delightfully; “Buttons” gave us the lays of West Point, and “Balaam's Ass,” as Mrs. Northrup expressed it, “really brayed very melodiously.”
Van Zandt had one decided advantage over the other men in his wooing, for he had brought his own saddle horse with him, and as Miss Solander had hers, a beautiful and very fast bay mare, and was an enthusiastic horsewoman, riding nearly every day, wet or dry, he frequently managed to be her escort.
They asked me to go with them one morning for a long ride through the mountains, and as it was not impossible that we might see a deer or some birds Miss Viola took her repeating shotgun, a pretty and close-shooting little weapon with which she was very expert, and Van Zandt and I our Stevens rifles.
My mount was the best to be had in the village, and was a strong, slow animal, intended by nature to grace a plow.
It was a grand day, crisp and clear, and the first level stretch of road we came to my young companions decided to have a race. Away they went, Blarney and I at an increasing interval behind them. At a turn in the road, about a quarter of a mile ahead, Harry's big gray was leading the mare by a good length, and when they rejoined me Miss Solander acknowledged her defeat handsomely, but put in a saving clause for her pet by adding, “She runs her best when frightened. I don't think even your splendid gray could catch her if we saw a bear.”
Harry laughed pleasantly, said he imagined his horse, too, might develop unexpected speed under such circumstances, and we cantered on. A little before noon we left the main road and struck into a bridle path that led through a dense pine forest, utterly impassable by reason of fallen trees and underbush, except on the narrow trail. We had not gone far when our way seemed barred by a huge dead pine that had fallen slantingly across the path and rested on a great boulder on the other side. It was too high to jump near the roots without great danger and the triangular opening by the rock did not look high enough for a horse to go through. However, we dismounted and managed to get the animals through, though there was very little room to spare.
In about half a mile we came to the edge of the wood, and the trail widened out to ten or twelve feet, bordered by a dense second growth of ash. Perhaps a thousand yards farther on Blarney became excited over some fresh tracks in the sandy soil, which we found were those of a deer that had passed only a few minutes before, as was shown by a clump of fern that was slowly straightening its crushed and bent fronds by the side of the narrow road. Miss Solander and I halted, while Harry rode quietly on ahead after Blarney, who was acting rather queerly, I thought, following the deer track for a few feet, then pausing, with nose in the air and bristling back, to snuff the air and growl. Van Zandt spoke to him, and the dog went steadily and slowly forward. He was a clever beast and the only setter I ever saw that could hunt all kinds of game well. Miss Solander promptly emptied the magazine of her shotgun, and refilled it with wire cartridges loaded with “buck and ball.”