“She looks to me very much thinner than she used to be,” said Mark. “How large her eyes seem, and so bright. I’m afraid she will die young, like her mother.”
“She has been ill, I can see,” said Maud, as the girl coughed, and then placed her hand upon her chest, with a gesture of pain. “What has been the matter with you, Wildduck?”
“Got drunk, Miss Maudie; lie out in the rain,” said the girl, who was as realistic as one of—let us say—Rhoda Broughton’s heroines.
“Oh, Wildduck!” said her instructress; “how could you get tipsy again, after all I said to you?”
“Tipsy!” said the child of nature, with a twinkle of wicked mirth in her large bright eye—“tipsy! me likum tipsy!”
Mark and his guest were totally unable to retain their gravity at this unexpected answer to Miss Stangrove’s appeal, though Jack composed his countenance with great rapidity as he noticed a deeply-pained look in Maud’s face, and something like a tear, as she hastily turned away.
“Are the old miamis there still, Wildduck?” asked Mark, by way of turning the subject.
“Where you shoot black fellow, long ago?” asked she. “By gum, you peppered ’em that one day. You kill ’em one—two—Misser Stangrove.”
“No, I think not, Wildduck. I fired my gun all about. Don’t think I killed anybody. Black fellow spear Red Bob that day.”
“Aha!” said the girl, her face suddenly changing to an expression of passion. “Serve him right, the murdering dog. He kill poor black fellows for nothing; shoot gins, too, and picaninnies; ask old man Jack.”