“Will you take this plow? or shall I?” she blazed out. “You can see for yourself there’s no time to lose.”
“Well, of all the high-an’-mighty airs!—and her nothin’ more than a squaw, when all’s said an’ done,” muttered the man. “Say, Stella, you wait till the Major hears of your goin’s-on; ’tendin’ Injun dances late at night and all that sort of thing! I know more about you than you think I do, and maybe you’ll be sorry yet you tried to turn me down.”
Stella, choking with wrath, caught up the plow-handles again without a word and chirruped to the patient pony. As her eyes mechanically swept the horizon, though without hope of aid, they descried a rapidly driven team approaching from the direction of the agency. Jack saw her face lighten suddenly, and saw, too, what had done it. In hot haste he jerked a plow from the back of his wagon, hitched his waiting team, and started a furrow both wide and deep a few rods from the cabins, whose owners were running hither and thither in helpless terror.
Half-blinded with smoke, and quivering with outraged pride, Stella dropped her plow to confront the agent and another—a tall, well-knit youth who was hurrying forward with both hands outstretched.
“Ethan—why, Ethan!”
“I seem to be just in time, again, Stella,” was all he said, and the plow started with a running jerk as the gray pony felt a man’s hand on the bit.
Two hours later, when the danger was over, and the smoking prairie lay black in the path of the setting sun, two young people stood side by side on a bluff overlooking the Indian camp.
“What was that fellow saying to you just before we came up, anyway? I thought I noticed a spark in somebody’s eye that was considerably hotter than the prairie fire,” Ethan slyly observed.
“He … he doesn’t know any better, I suppose,” Stella murmured.