“He’s a nice little fellow,” Merriam was saying to himself, as he passed the gate and turned toward the city. “He’s a nice little fellow; and so was his father!”
As the thoroughbred bore him rapidly back to town, Rodney Merriam several times repeated to himself abstractedly: “He’s a nice little fellow!”
CHAPTER X
THE RIVER ROAD
Rodney Merriam’s efforts to manage Zelda had not thus far been wholly satisfactory. He might, under ordinary circumstances, have submitted to what seemed to be the inevitable, but he had never in his life tamely accepted defeat. He could not take the forts by storm; he would lay siege to them, and so he planned a long campaign. Zelda’s intractability was as annoying as it was charming. He scolded her, and she laughed at him; he gave orders and she disobeyed. He appealed to her pride by declaring that the town was gossiping about her, and she replied that being talked about was better than being ignored. She twitted him freely about his air of mystery and asked him questions so frankly impertinent that it was easy for him to parry them. There seemed to be an ill-defined line between the child and the woman; and he was never quite sure on which side of this faint boundary she stood.
Merriam liked to ride with her, and they explored many highways and byways in the bright fall days. She forgot the dull house and her strange father in the company of Rodney Merriam, whose own youth revived in her company.
They came one bright blue afternoon in late October to “the river road,” as it was called. It rose at one point to a considerable height for this flat country, and when they reached it to-day they drew up their horses as usual to enjoy the view. The soft wind that came out of the south and fanned their faces might have been a wind of May. The woodland back of them was glorious with autumn color,—deep red and gold dominant, but with a single tree standing forth here and there in unbroken green. A stake-and-rider fence inclosed the wood and crept on down the road. On the other side lay the bluff, and below it the river with its broad bed and sadly depleted channel. Across the stream stood a group of sycamores, and beyond them lay farms, at peace in the clear, still afternoon.
Zelda and her uncle reined in their horses and viewed the tranquil beauty of the scene with satisfaction. Farm hands were clearing a bit of land farther down-stream and their voices rose in the quiet air. Merriam suggested that the men were skirmishers and that an army lay behind them and would soon swing into view.
“What a place this is for a little artillery work,” he continued. “Those fellows are marching up the river—foolish too, to get caught in a place like that, with a bluff on one side and a river on the other.”
“But they could cross the river,—the gentlemen on horseback, whatever you call them.”
“Cavalry, my child.”