“Good! The encampment is far away. I will not go through the woods to-night. Not me.” She covered her face with her cape. I heard a prodigious yawn. “Good night,” she said, in a muffled tone.
I stowed Joey away on a bed of hemlock boughs in the wagon, and after I had satisfied myself that he slept, I returned to the fire. I knelt beside the shrouded figure.
“Wanza Lyttle,” I said sternly, “uncover your face and look at me.”
She kicked out ruthlessly with both copper-toed shoes, wriggled angrily beneath her cape, and then lay quiet.
“Do you think, Wanza, you should have followed us in this shameless fashion,—and in this disguise?”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t, if I wanted to,” a surly voice replied from the folds of the cape.
“You are always doing inconceivable, silly things,” I went on. “How did you get here?”
“I followed you on horseback. Rosebud is tethered a ways back in the woods.”
“What will your father say to this? What will the entire village say when the busybodies learn of it?”
“Father isn’t at home; he’s at Harrison. As for the others,—” Wanza sat up, and cast the cape from her—“little I care for their talk.”