"But it jes' happens that the confiding critter has raised her brood in the sedges there, being encouraged an' incited thereto by my wife, who throws it bread an' other pickings. Taking Danvers' gun-barrel for some new kind of worm, when he pokes it through the sedge she sails right up and is examining the boring thereof, when, bang! she's blown into a railroad disaster."
"Don't believe him, Mrs. Ravell," Danvers pleaded. "It was a wild duck, and I shot it flying."
"So if the new gun's what you say it is," the tormentor finished, "you'd better to practise on prairie chicken an' don't be misled by Mrs. Leslie's hens."
"As though I couldn't tell a hen from a prairie chicken!"
Carter joined in the laugh which Danvers' indignant remonstrance drew from the women, yet under the laugh, beneath his humorous indifference, lay a sad heart. "She knew they were coming! She didn't tell me!" Down by the lake he had reasoned the situation out to its cruel conclusion—"She's ashamed of me!" How it hurt! Yet the flick on the raw served him well in that it set him on his mettle, nerved him to carry off the situation.
He did not try to transcend his limitations, to clog himself with unfamiliar restrictions of speech or manners. But within those limitations he did his best, and did it so well that neither woman was conscious of social difference. He showed none of the bashfulness which might be expected from a frontiersman sitting for the first time at table with fashionable women in dinner-gowns. On the contrary, he admired the pretty dresses, the white arms, the hands that handled the teacups so gracefully; and when he spoke the matter so eclipsed the manner that it is doubtful whether Kate Ravell noticed a single locution. His shrewd common-sense, quaint humor, the quickness with which he grasped a new point of view, and the freshness of his own impressed her with his strong personality. Pleased and amused, she had no time to notice grammatical lapses or small table gaucheries that had irritated Helen by constant repetition.
"He's delightful," she told her husband, in a conjugal aside.
In the conversation which ensued after they joined the others outside, Carter also took no mean part. Of things he knew, and these ranged over subjects that were the more interesting because unfamiliar to the town-bred folks, he spoke entertainingly; and on those foreign to his experience he preserved silence. On every common topic his opinion was sound, wholesome. His keen wit punctured several fallacies. The quaint respect of his manner to the women served him as well with the men.
"Big brain," Ravell told his wife in that conference which all married folk have held since the first pair retired to their bedroom under the stars at the forks of the Euphrates. "That fellow will go far."
"So gentle and kind," Kate added. "I think Helen is lucky. Those English people are nice," she went on, musingly; "but if I were Helen I'd keep an eye on Mrs. Leslie."