"Then on to silly questions about does a horse lie down when it goes to sleep each night after its hard day's labour, and isn't her horse's sash too tight, and what a pretty fetlock he has, so long and thick and brown—Oh, do you call that the mane? How absurd of poor little me! Mr. Daggett knows just everything, doesn't he? He's perfectly terrifying. And where in the world did he ever learn to ride so stunningly, like one of those dare-devils in a Wild West entertainment? If her own naughty, naughty horse tries to throw her on the ground again where he can bite her she'll just have Mr. D. ride the nassy ole sing and teach him better manners, so she will. There now! He must have heard that—just see him move his funny ears—don't tell her that horses can't understand things that are said. And, seriously now, where did Mr. D. ever get his superb athletic training, because, oh! how all too rare it is to see a brain-worker of strong mentality and a splendid athlete in one and the same man. Oh, how pathetically she had wished and wished to be a man and take her place out in the world fighting its battles, instead of poor little me who could never be anything but a homebody to worship the great, strong, red-blooded men who did the fighting and carried on great industries—not even an athletic girl like those dear things up ahead—and this horse is bobbing up and down like that on purpose, just to make poor little me giddy, and so forth. Holding her bridle rein daintily she was with the lace handkerchief I'd give her that cost me twelve fifty.
"Mr. D. took it all like a real man. He said her ignorance of a horse was adorable and laughed heartily at it. And he smiled in a deeply modest and masterful way and said 'But, really, that's nothing—nothing at all, I assure you,' when she said about how he was a corking athlete—and then kept still to see if she was going on to say more about it. But she didn't, having the God-given wisdom to leave him wanting. And then he would be laughing again at her poor-little-me horse talk.
"I never had a minute's doubt after that, for it was the eyes of one fascinated to a finish that he turned back on me half an hour later as he says: 'Really, Mrs. Pettengill, our Miss Hester is feminine to her finger tips, is she not?' 'She is, she is,' I answers. 'If you only knew the trouble I had with the chit about that horrible old riding skirt of hers when all her girl friends are wearing a sensible costume!' Hetty blushed good and proper at this, not knowing how indecent I might become, and Mr. D. caught her at it. Aggie Tuttle and Stella Ballard at this minute is pretending to be shooting up a town with the couple of revolvers they'd brought along in their cunning little holsters. Mr. D. turns his glazed eyes to me once more. 'The real womanly woman,' says he in a hushed voice, 'is God's best gift to man.' Just like that.
"'Landed!' I says to myself. 'Throw him up on the bank and light a fire.'
"And mebbe you think this tet-à-tet had not been noticed by the merry throng up front. Not so. The shouting and songs had died a natural death, and the last three miles of that trail was covered in a gloomy silence, except for the low voices of Hetty and the male she had so neatly pronged. I could see puzzled glances cast back at them and catch mutterings of bewilderment where the trail would turn on itself. But the poor young things didn't yet realize that their prey was hanging back there for reasons over which he hadn't any control. They thought, of course, he was just being polite or something.
"When we got to the picnic place, though, they soon saw that all was not well. There was some resumption of the merrymaking as they dismounted and the girls put one stirrup over the saddle-horn and eased the cinch like the boys did, and proud of their knowledge, but the glances they now shot at Hetty wasn't bewildered any more. They was glances of pure fright. Hetty, in the first place, had to be lifted off her horse, and Mr. D. done it in a masterly way to show her what a mere feather she was in his giant's grasp. Then with her feet on the ground she reeled a mite, so he had to support her. She grasped his great strong arm firmly and says: 'It's nothing—I shall be right presently—leave me please, go and help those other girls.' They had some low, heated language about his leaving her at such a crisis, with her gripping his arm till I bet it showed for an hour. But finally they broke and he loosened her horse's sash, as she kept quaintly calling it, and she recovered completely and said it had been but a moment's giddiness anyway, and what strength he had in those arms, and yet could use it so gently, and he said she was a brave, game little woman, and the picnic was served to one and all, with looks of hearty suspicion and rage now being shot at Hetty from every other girl there.
"And now I see that my hunch has been even better than I thought. Not only does the star male hover about Hetty, cutely perched on a fallen log with her dainty, gleaming ankles crossed, and looking so fresh and nifty and feminine, but I'm darned if three or four of the other males don't catch the contagion of her woman's presence and hang round her, too, fetching her food of every kind there, feeding her spoonfuls of Aggie Tuttle's plum preserves, and all like that, one comical thing after another. Yes, sir; here was Mac Gordon and Riley Hardin and Charlie Dickman and Roth Hyde, men about town of the younger dancing set, that had knowed Hetty for years and hardly ever looked at her—here they was paying attentions to her now like she was some prize beauty, come down from Spokane for over Sunday, to say nothing of Mr. D., who hardly ever left her side except to get her another sardine sandwich or a paper cup of coffee. It was then I see the scientific explanation of it, like these high-school professors always say that science is at the bottom of everything. The science of this here was that they was all devoting themselves to Hetty for the simple reason that she was the one and only woman there present.
"Of course these girls in their modest Non Plush Ultras didn't get the scientific secret of this fact. They was still too obsessed with the idea that they ought to be ogled on account of them by any male beast in his right senses. But they knew they'd got in wrong somehow. By this time they was kind of bunching together and telling each other things in low tones, while not seeming to look at Hetty and her dupes, at which all would giggle in the most venemous manner. Daisy Estelle left the bunch once and made a coy bid for the notice of Mr. D. by snatching his cap and running merrily off with it about six feet. If there was any one in the world—except Hetty—could make a man hate the idea of riding pants for women, she was it. I could see the cold, flinty look come into his eyes as he turned away from her to Hetty with the pitcher of lemonade. And then Beryl Mae Macomber, she gets over close enough for Mr. D. to hear it, and says conditions is made very inharmonious at home for a girl of her temperament, and she's just liable any minute to chuck everything and either take up literary work or go into the movies, she don't know which and don't care—all kind of desperate so Mr. D. will feel alarmed about a beautiful young thing like that out in the world alone and unprotected and at the mercy of every designing scoundrel. But I don't think Mr. D. hears a word of it, he's so intently listening to Hetty who says here in this beautiful mountain glade where all is peace how one can't scarcely believe that there is any evil in the world anywhere, and what a difference it does make when one comes to see life truly. Then she crossed and recrossed her silken ankles, slightly adjusted her daring tan skirt, and raised her eyes wistfully to the treetops, and I bet there wasn't a man there didn't feel that she belonged in the home circle with the little ones gathered about, telling 'em an awfully exciting story about the naughty, naughty, bad little white kitten and the ball of mamma's yarn.
"Yes, sir; Hetty was as much of a revelation to me in one way as she would of been to that party in another if I hadn't saved her from it. She must have had the correct female instinct all these years, only no one had ever started her before on a track where there was no other entries. With those other girls dressed like she was Hetty would of been leaning over some one's shoulder to fork up her own sandwiches, and no one taking hardly any notice whether she'd had some of the hot coffee or whether she hadn't. And the looks she got throughout the afternoon! Say, I wouldn't of trusted that girl at the edge of a cliff with a single pair of those No. 9872's anywhere near.
"After the lunch things was packed up there was faint attempts at fun and frolic with songs and chorus—Riley Hardin has a magnificent bass voice at times and Mac Gordon and Charlie Dickman and Roth Hyde wouldn't be so bad if they'd let these Turkish cigarettes alone—and the boys got together and sung some of their good old business-college songs, with the girls coming in while they murdered Hetty with their beautiful eyes. But Hetty and Mr. D. sort of withdrew from the noisy enjoyment and talked about the serious aspects of life and how one could get along almost any place if only they had their favourite authors. And Mr. D. says doesn't she sing at all, and she says, Oh! in a way; that her voice has a certain parlour charm, she has been told, and she sings at—you can't really call it singing—two or three of the old Scotch songs of homely sentiment like the Scotch seem to get into their songs as no other nation can, or doesn't he think so, and he does, indeed. And he's reading a wonderful new novel in which there is much of Nature with its lessons for each of us, but in which love conquers all at the end, and the girl in it reminds him strongly of her, and perhaps she'll be good enough to sing for him—just for him alone in the dusk—if he brings this book up to-morrow night so he can show her some good places in it.