he cried.
"Will he, indeed?" cried Hildegarde. "Catch me if you can, you odious redskin! I defy you in every withering term that a Cooper maiden ever invented!"
"Ho! if you are a Cooper maiden, you are nothing but a female!" said Gerald. "Aha! she turns, she flies! she feels the scalp a-wr-r-r-r-r-iggling on her head! she fears she'll soon be a female dead! Ho, ho! Medicine-man! Big Injin! Ho!"
Flying breathless now, Hildegarde darted hither and thither, hiding under the leaves, dodging behind the tree trunks. Finally, seeing her foe pausing for an instant behind the bole of a huge nut-tree, she rushed upon him, and seizing him, shook him violently. Then she let go her hold and screamed, for it was not Gerald that she was shaking.
Roger Merryweather stepped forward, unable to keep from smiling at her face of horror. He felt a little "out of it," perhaps, and twenty-four seemed a long way from seventeen; but he should not have watched the girls, he told himself with some severity, without letting them know he was there. Now this pretty child regarded him as a double eavesdropper and spy. But his apology was drowned in the shouts of the boys.
"Hi! here's Roger! hurrah! Roger, Roger! my scientific codger, come and play Big Injin! The pale-faces are uncommonly game, but we shall have them all the same. Hi! there goes Dropsy!"
Indeed, at this moment Gertrude tripped over a tree root and fell headlong; as she fell she caught at Phil's ankle, just as he was in the act of grasping Bell by the flying tail of her gown; another moment, and all three were on the ground together in a confused heap.
"Anybody hurt?" asked Roger, going to pick them up.
"Oh no!" said Bell, sitting up and shaking the pine needles from her hair. "Toots was underneath, and she makes a noble cushion. All right, Toots? and how do you come here, Professor?" The three fallen ones righted themselves, and sat up and panted; seeing which, the others came and sat down, too, and for a space no one spoke, for no one had any breath save Roger, and he was laughing.
"I have been botanizing," he said at last. "I was coming quietly along, when suddenly Bedlam broke loose, and I have been standing by to go about ever since. No extra lunatics seemed to be needed, or I should have been charmed to assist."