"My mistake," he said.
That was all he said, except the word "Thanks" when I reached him a box.
"He's a surly creature," Tish observed as he crackled through the brush again. "More than likely that girl's better off without him."
"He looks rather downhearted," Aggie remarked. "Much that we think is temper is due to unhappiness."
"Much of your charitable view is due to a good dinner too," Tish said. "Here we are, in the center of the wilderness, with great peaks on every hand, and we meet a fellow creature who speaks nine words, and begrudges those. If he's as stingy with money as with language she's had a narrow escape."
"He's had kind of a raw deal," Bill put in. "The girl was stuck on him all right, until this moving-picture chap came along. He offered to take some pictures with her in them, and it was all off. They're making up a play now, and she's to be in it."
"What sort of a play?" Tish demanded.
"Sorry not to oblige," Bill replied. "Can't say the nature of it."
But all of us felt that Bill knew and would not say.
Tish, to whom a mystery is a personal affront, determined to find out for herself; and when later in the evening we saw the light of Bell's camp-fire, it was Tish herself who suggested that we go over and visit with him.