“Oh, I’d be afraid to stay here alone, and I can’t walk another step. It’s bad enough to walk home. I guess this log’s all right. Have you ever been to Malone?”
“Never!” Fessenden for the first time realized his rude wild state. “I’ve never been twenty miles from here.”
“My! you are a country bumpkin. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings,” she added contritely as Fessenden’s sunburnt face assumed a purple hue. “I’m always saying silly things. You mustn’t mind me. The boys always say I just rattle out anything that comes into my head, and they don’t mind a bit.”
“I’m sure I don’t either,” said Fessenden quickly; he was determined to equal the Maloner in insensibility. “I should think”—he blundered somehow through his first compliment—“that anything you said would be about right.”
“Well, that’s what they tell me,” she replied complacently. “You can get me another cup of that sap if you like.”
Fessenden held the cup to her mouth, which was thin and curved and scarlet. Then, partly because his emotions were rendering him speechless, partly because he was fired with the primitive desire of the male to show off before the female, he swung his axe to his shoulder and muttered that he guessed he’d better cut down a tree; he was wasting too much time.
His axe he always carried with him. It occupied a place in his affections second to his canoe, and preceding a more lukewarm passion for his gun. In a moment Miss Grace Morton, of Malone, was admiring a lithe strong back, the supple free action of two brawny arms as the axe swung as easily as a switch, cutting straight and deep at every stroke. The old tree was quickly brought to earth, and Fessenden leaned on his axe and dared once more to look into the soft eyes beneath the red cap.
“It was time that old tree came down,” he remarked huskily, yet with a fair assumption of indifference. “It hasn’t given any sap for two years, and has been bothering the other trees.”
“Bothering? You talk as if trees was people.”
“Well, they are in a way—that is, they’ve often seemed alive to me.”