“Or how well you know the girl? Isn’t that it, Mr. Bascomb?”
“Not always,” said Bascomb uneasily.
Swickey’s direct gaze was disconcerting. She had reproved him without a word of reproof.
“You haven’t known me very long, have you?” she asked.
“Long enough to want to know you better,” he replied, smiling.
“Dave never says such things,” she remarked, half to herself.
“Oh, Davy’s a clam—a nice clam,” he added hastily, as a storm gathered in Swickey’s eyes. “He can say things when it’s necessary, but he usually does things first, you know, and then it takes dynamite or delirium to get him to talk of them. Now, look at that! He just meandered down and dug up that canoe as though it grew there. Never said a word—”
“Oh, yes, he did. You were looking at me and didn’t hear him.”
“Well, that lets me out, but I’ll bet a strawberry you didn’t know he had a canoe hidden up here.”
“You’ll have to find a strawberry, a nice, ripe, wild one, for it’s my canoe. Dave and I hid it there, before the—the—accident. We used to come in here and fish all day. I hope the porcupines haven’t chewed it to pieces.”