“Now, I’ll dance you a sailor’s hornpipe, and then I must go out and milk. If ma’d been home, it would have been finished long ago. But when the cat’s away the mice will play, you know; so here goes.”
Unfortunately, at that very moment the “cat” to whom he referred, Mercy, in fact, approached the cabin from a direction which even Wahneenah did not observe, and opened a rear door plump upon this unprecedented scene.
Abel stopped short in his jig, one foot still uplifted and his fiddle bow half drawn, while the Sun Maid was yet sweeping her most graceful curtsey; and even the serious Gaspar had left his seat to prance about the room to the notes of Abel’s music.
Mercy also remained transfixed, utterly dumfounded, and doubting the evidence of her own senses; but after a moment becoming able to exclaim:
“So! This is how lonesome you be when I leave you, is it?”
CHAPTER XII.
AFTER FOUR YEARS.
Despite a really warm and hospitable heart, it was not pleasant for Mercy Smith to find that her submissive husband had taken upon himself to keep open house in this fashion for all who chose to call; and, as she often expressed it, the settler’s wife “hated an Indian on sight.”