"What possessed you to go to-day, Rachel?" asked Tillie dubiously. "Do you think it is quite—"
"Oh, yes, dear—quite," returned that young lady confidently; "and you need not assume that anxious air regarding either the proprieties or my youthful affections, for, to tell the truth, I am impelled to go through sheer perversity; not because your latest favorite wants me, but simply because he does not."
Twenty minutes after her offer they were mounted and clattering away over the crisp bronze turf. To Stuart the task of entertaining a lady whose remarks to him seldom verged from the ironical was anything but a sinecure—more, it was easy to see that he was unused to it; and an ungallant query to himself was: "Why did she come, anyway?" He had not heard her reply to Tillie.
The air was crisp and cold enough to make their heavy wraps a comfort, especially when they reached the higher land; the sun was showing fitfully, low-flying, skurrying clouds often throwing it in eclipse.
"Snow is coming," prophesied the girl, with a weather-eye to the north, where the sky was banking up in pale-gray masses; "perhaps not heavy enough to impede your trip south, to Owens, but that bit over there looks like a visiting-card of winter."
"How weather-wise you are!" he observed. "Now I had noticed not the slightest significance in all that; in fact, you seem possessed of several Indian accomplishments—their wood-lore, their language, their habit of going to nature instead of an almanac; and did not Mrs. Hardy say you knew some Indian songs? Who taught you them?"
"Songs came near getting us into a civil war at breakfast," she observed, "and I am not sure that the ground is any more safe around Indian than Scotch ones."
"There is something more substantial of the former race" he said, pointing ahead.
It was the hulking figure of a Siwash, who had seen them first and tried to dodge out of sight, and failing, halted at the edge of a little stream.
"Hostile?" queried Stuart, relying more on his companion's knowledge than his own; but she shook her head.