“So I see; that is the reason I am asking an audience. I will do the talking, and it need not be a very long talk, if you are too tired.”
“I believe I will go,” she said, at last. “I was thinking it would be nice to float in a canoe again—just to float lazy on the current. Can’t we do that?”
“Nothing easier,” he answered, entirely delighted that she was again more like the ’Tana of two months before. She seemed to him a little paler and a little taller, but 235 as they walked together to the canoe, he felt that they would again come to the old chummy days of Sinna Ferry, when they quarreled and made up as regularly as the sun rose and set.
“Well, why don’t you talk?” she asked, as their little craft drifted away from the tents and the man who washed the soil by the spring run. “What did you do with the women folks?”
“Gave them to Overton. They concluded not to risk their precious selves with me, when they discovered that he, for a wonder, was disengaged. Really and truly, that angular schoolmistress will make herself Mrs. Overton if he is not careful. She flatters him enough to spoil an average man; looks at him with so much respectful awe, you know, though she never does say much to him.”
“Saves her breath to drill Mrs. Huzzard with,” observed the girl, dryly. “That poor, dear woman has a bee in her muddled old head, and the bee is Captain Leek and his fine manners. I can see it, plain as day. Bless her heart! I hear her go over and over words that she always used to say wrong, and she does eat nicer than she used to. Humph! I wonder if Dan Overton will take as kindly to being taught, when the school-teacher begins with him.”
There was a mirthless, unlovely smile about her lips, and Lyster reached over and clasped her hand coaxingly.
“’Tana, what has changed you so?” he asked. “Is it your sickness—is it the gold—or what, that makes you turn from your old friends? Dan never says a word, but I notice it. You never talk to him, and he has almost quit going to your cabin at all, though he would 236 do anything for you, I know. My dear, you will find few friends like him in the world.”
“Oh, don’t—don’t bother me about him,” she answered, irritably. “He is all right, of course. But I—”
Then she stopped, and with a determined air turned the subject.