“It always was a good job; wasn’t it?” Suddenly a girl’s head was thrust mischievously near to his—a head that burned like a lamp in the dim stall.
“Always a good job!” White teeth flashed within a foot of his ear. “Oh! I can parlez-vous a cow. I’ve taken full care of one for a month.”
He started—the one-handed soldier. White jets flew, between his fingers, giving each girl a milk-eye.
“Here—just let me try. Let me ‘spell’ you for a while!”
“Copper-nob” pushed him off the stool. “I’m a Camp Fire Girl—with honors for milking. Watch me ‘parlez-vous’ her! Hove—lady?” This to the cow.
“Well! by George, I’ve ‘no kick coming.’” The ex-service man rose, with a glance at his Y. D. button. “I’m as awkward as a one-handed fiddler, this morning,” he confessed ruefully.
“And—and surely the others won’t mind, the other campers—if we keep breakfast waiting.” Lura from the milking stool looked up at Pemrose, “not when we tell them how—whom—we’ve been helping! ’Tisn’t as if we had ‘mooned’ round in the woods—” the milk was coursing richly now—“watching—apparitions—in red handkerchiefs.”
She broke off, cooing to the placid Jersey, for Pemrose seemed seeing apparitions at the moment, staring bewitched, at a mountainside opposite, where a figure on a small bay horse was slowly climbing a rough bridle path.
Her blue eyes, those of the inventor’s favored daughter, shone half-petulantly with the feeling that she was not the only lion in the desert, with fabulous hearing, if not roaring, powers, as she caught the far, bright flash of metal—of more than the stirrup from the rider’s right foot.
“But who—is—she?” The girl’s black eyebrows drew together. “If Andrew was here, he’d say she looked ‘fey’, unbalanced—rather unbalanced. Her eyes, they were the strangest—wild and bright. But she looks like a sort of ‘needle nose’, too,” with a sudden snap, “cunning in her face—and she rivals me with radio—plays with it out-of-doors ... who ...”