"The last from Grey Eagle or yourself?" asked Stuart teasingly. But the girl spoke up, covering the old man's momentary hesitation.
"From me," she said coolly; "if any name is needed to give color to so general a desire, you can use mine."
His face flushed; he looked as if about to speak to her, but, instead, his words were to MacDougall.
"I will be very glad to carry the word to your friend," he said; "it is but a light weight."
"Yes, I doubt na it seems so to the carrier, but I would no think it so light a thing to ha' word o' the lad. We ha' been neighbors, ye see, this five year, with but little else that was civilized to come near us. An' there's a wide difference atween neighbors o' stone pavements an' neighbors o' the hills—a fine difference."
"Yes, there is," agreed the girl; and from their tones one would gather the impression that all the splendors of a metropolis were as nothing when compared with the luxuries of "shack" life in the "bush."
"Can ye hit the trail down at the forks without me along?" asked MacDougall, with a sudden remembrance of the fact that Rachel did not know the way so well from the "Place of the Tamahnous" as she did from Scot's Mountain. She nodded her head independently.
"I can, Davy MacDougall. And you are paying me a poor compliment when you ask me so doubtfully. I've been prowling through the bush enough for this past year to know it for fifty miles around, instead of twenty. And now if your highness thinks we've had our share of this fire, let us 'move our freight,' 'hit the breeze,' or any other term of the woolly West that means action, and get up and git."
"I am at your service," answered Stuart, with a graciousness of manner that made her own bravado more glaring by contrast. He could see she assumed much for the sake of mischief and irritation to himself; and his tone in reply took an added intonation of refinement; but the hint was lost on her—she only laughed.
"I tell you what it is, Davy MacDougall," she remarked to that gentleman, "this slip of your nation has been planted in the wrong century. He belongs to the age of lily-like damsels in sad-colored frocks, and knights of high degree on bended knee and their armor hung to the rafters. I get a little mixed in my dates sometimes, but believe it was the age when caps and bells were also in fashion."