“Don’t you know any real girls, Martin?”
“None but you, Clare.”
She bent an odd, happy glance on him. It meant: “Is it possible that I am the first with him?”
“Why do you look at me like that?” he asked.
“Oh, you’re rather nice to look at,” she said airily.
“Thanks,” he said, blushing. He was modest, but that sort of thing doesn’t exactly hurt the most modest of men. “Same to you!”
They camped that night on a little plateau of sweet grass, and after supper Mary told tales by the fire. Mary, bland and uncensorious, was a perfect chaperon. What she thought of the present situation Stonor never knew. He left it to Clare to come to an understanding with her. That they shared many a secret from which he was excluded, he knew. Mary had soon recovered from her terror of Clare’s seeming illness.
“This the story of the Wolf-Man,” she began. “Once on a tam there was a man had two bad wives. They had no shame. That man think maybe if he go away where there were no other people he can teach those women to be good, so he move his lodge away off on the prairie. Near where they camp was a high hill, and every evenin’ when the sun go under the man go up on top of the hill, and look all over the country to see where the buffalo was feeding, and see if any enemies come. There was a buffalo-skull on that hill which he sit on.
“In the daytime while he hunt the women talk. ‘This is ver’ lonesome,’ one say. ‘We got nobody talk to, nobody to visit.’
“Other woman say: ‘Let us kill our husband. Then we go back to our relations, and have good time.’