"Is that you, Sandy?"
It was a woman's voice, but it came from a figure wearing a man's hat and coat. Lysander stopped the mules.
"Why, Minervy! what's up?"
"Oh, nothin'. I just walked a ways to meet you." The woman climbed up beside her husband. "You're later 'n I 'lowed you'd be. Something must 'a' kep' you."
"Yes, I come around by the winery. I saw Poindexter over t' the Mission, an' he said the old Colonel wanted to see me."
"The old Colonel wanted to see you, Sandy?" The woman turned upon him anxiously in the yellow twilight. The rakishness of her attire was grotesquely at variance with her troubled voice and small, freckled face. "What did he want with you?"
"Well, he said he wanted me to help him make a trade with the old man,"—Lysander sent a short, explosive laugh through his nostrils; "an' I told 'im I reckoned he knowed that the old woman was the old man, up our way."
"Oh, I'm glad you give it to 'im that way, Sandy," said the woman earnestly, rising to her habiliments. "Mother'll be prouder 'n a peacock of you. I hope you held your head high and sassed him right and left." Mrs. Sproul straightened her manly back and raised her shrill, womanish voice nervously. "Oh, I hope you told him you'd stood at the cannon's mouth before, an' wasn't afraid to face him or any other red-handed destroyer of his country's flag. I hope you told him that, Sandy."
"Well, I wasn't to say brash," returned her husband slowly and soothingly. "It wouldn't do, Minervy; it wouldn't do." Lysander uncoiled his long braided lash and whipped off two or three spikes of the withering, perfumed sage. "I talked up to 'im, though, middlin' impident; but law! it didn't hurt 'im; he's got a hide like a hypothenuse."