VI.
“Oh, yes, I walked all the way up the mountain from the railroad depot,” explained the young woman whose arrival we chronicled in another chapter, “but I stopped over night at a cabin on the way and discovered some just delightful characters—the Tollivers—regular Craddock sort of people, an old lady and her son.”
By some method known only to herself she had put herself upon a speaking-plane with Dufour, who, as she approached him, was standing in an angle of the wide wooden veranda waiting for the moon to rise over the distant peaks of the eastern mountains.
“I saw Mr. Tolliver to-day while whipping a brook down here,” said he, turning to look her squarely in the face.
“Oh, did you! Isn’t he a virile, villainous, noble, and altogether melodramatic looking man? I wish there was some one here who could sketch him for me. But, say, Mr. Dufour, what do you mean, please, when you speak of whipping a brook?”
She took from her pocket a little red note-book and a pencil as he promptly responded: “Whipping a brook? oh, that’s angler’s nonsense, it means casting the line into the water, you know.”
“That’s funny,” she remarked, making a note.
She was taller than Dufour, and so slender and angular that in comparison with his excessive plumpness she looked gaunt and bony. In speaking her lips made all sorts of wild contortions showing her uneven teeth to great effect, and the extreme rapidity of her utterance gave an explosive emphasis to her voice. Over her forehead, which projected, a fluffy mass of pale yellow hair sprang almost fiercely as if to attack her scared and receding chin.
“You are from Michigan, I believe, Miss Crabb,” remarked Dufour.
“Oh, dear, no!” she answered, growing red in the face, “No, indeed. I am from Indiana, from Ringville, associate editor of the Star.”