From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless.
"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!"
His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete.
"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.
"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to fall in with his cue.
"The swooning age outlasted him—lasted, indeed, into the era of hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."
"They do give medals," she added.
"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"
Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five or six miles from a settlement—well, it was a fact. Over the bump of their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck her with sudden alarm.
"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."