Corona talked to Mr. Archibald. It was her custom always to talk to the principal personage of a party.
“It gives me pleasure, sir,” said she, “to meet with you and your wife. It is so seldom that we find any one—” She was interrupted by Mrs. Perkenpine, who stood behind her.
The she-guide was a large woman, apparently taller than Matlack. Her sunburnt face was partly shaded by a man’s straw hat, secured on her head by strings tied under her chin. She wore a very plain gown, coarse in texture, and of a light-blue color, which showed that it had been washed very often. Her voice and her shoes, the latter well displayed by her short skirt, creaked, but her gray eyes were bright, and moved about after the manner of searchlights.
“Well,” said she to Miss Raybold, “what do you want?”
Corona turned her head and placidly gazed up at her. “I simply wished to let you know that you might join this company here if you liked. The two men guides are coming, you see.”
Mrs. Perkenpine glanced around the group. “Is there any hunting stories to be told?” she asked.
Mr. Archibald laughed. “I don’t know,” he said, “but perhaps we may have some. I am sure that Matlack here has hunting stories to tell.”
Mrs. Perkenpine shook her head. “No, sir,” said she; “I don’t want none of his stories. I’ve heard them all mostly two or three times over.”
“I dare say you have,” said Phil, seating himself on a fallen trunk, a little back from the fire; “but you see, Mrs. Perkenpine, you are so obstinate about keepin’ on livin’. If you’d died when you was younger, you wouldn’t have heard so many of those stories.”
“There’s been times,” said she, “when you was tellin’ the story of the bear cubs and the condensed milk, when I wished I had died when I was younger, or else you had.”