"Stella Ballard it was tells me about the picnic, calling me in as I passed their house to show me her natty new riding togs that had just come from the mail-order house. She called from back of a curtain, and when I got into the parlour she had them on, pleased as all get-out. Pretty they was, too—riding breeches and puttees and a man's flannel shirt and a neat-fitting Norfolk jacket, and Stella being a fine, upstanding figure.
"'They may cause considerable talk,' says she, smoothing down one leg where it wrinkled a bit, 'but really I think they look perfectly stunning on me, and wasn't it lucky they fit me so beautifully? They're called the Non Plush Ultra.'
"'The what?' I says.
"'The Non Plush Ultra,' she answers. 'That's the name of them sewed in the band.'
"'What's that mean?' I wanted to know.
"'Why,' says Stella, 'that's Latin or Greek, I forget which, and it means they're the best, I believe. Oh, let me see! Why, it means nothing beyond, or something like that; the farthest you can go, I think. One forgets all that sort of thing after leaving high school.'
"'Well,' I says, 'they fit fine, and it's the only modest rig for a woman to ride a horse in, but they certainly are non plush, all right. That thin goods will never wear long against saddle leather, take my word for it.'
"But of course this made no impression on Stella—she was standing on the centre table by now, so she could lamp herself in the glass over the mantel—and then she tells me about the excursion for Saturday and how Mr. Burchell Daggett is enthused about it, him being a superb horseman himself, and, if I know what she means, don't I think she carries herself in the saddle almost better than any girl in her set, and won't her style show better than ever in this duck of a costume, and she must get her tan shoes polished, and do I think Mr. Daggett really meant anything when he said he'd expect her some day to return the masonic pin she had lifted off his vest the other night at the dance, and so on.
"It was while she was babbling this stuff that I get the strange hunch that Hetty Tipton is in grave danger and I ought to run to her; it seemed almost I could hear her calling on me to save her from some horrible fate. So I tell Stella yes, she's by far the finest rider in the whole Kulanche Valley, and she ought to get anything she wants with that suit on, and then I beat it quick over to the Ezra Button house where Hetty boards.
"You can laugh all you want to, but that hunch of mine was the God's truth. Hetty was in the gravest danger she'd faced since one time in early infancy when she got give morphine for quinine. What made it more horrible, she hadn't the least notion of her danger. Quite the contrary.