WESTY DECIDED TO DO THE COOKING AND LET RIP DO THE MENIAL CHORES.
Just as he turned away from the brook to go back he felt instinctively the presence of some one near him. Glancing around, he saw nothing. Then he looked upward and something moved in the refractory light shining through the gaunt-limbed trees. Breathless, he fled. His uncle sensed something amiss as he ran toward them.
“Gee, you know, Unk, strike me pink if I didn’t see a girl sitting up in a tree down there. Looks to me like an Indian, s’ help me Sam!”
“You’re one heck of a scout, you are,” Mr. Wilde chided him, “running away from a poor helpless Indian girl. What in thunder were you afraid of?”
“Aw, I wasn’t afraid of her at all, I was just taken off my feet when I saw it was a girl. I don’t like ’em much, anyway. That is, most of ’em!”
“Of course not,” Mr. Wilde said with mock sympathy, and as an afterthought added, “Not until you get a little older! Come on, we’ll take a stroll down and inquire who this maid of the mountains happens to be.”
Westy left his bacon to an unknown Fate and followed the rest to the brook, where they beheld Rip’s dryad sitting, feet under her, on the limb of a huge tree.
The setting sun threw a halo of scarlet around her. Bobbed hair, dark and straight, with a band of crimson ribbon encircling her forehead. Eyes as dark as the forests at night with a laughing light in them. Her small face and strong looking arms were tanned. They could see at first glance that here was a child of the open spaces.
A girl of about thirteen, they judged, when she slipped out of the tree as noiselessly as a wildcat and stood before them slim and tall for her age.
One would gather at first that she was an Indian, until she smiled at them one and all, sweetly yet fearlessly.