“His hind legs. He’s pretty smart with a boat, and a gun, too. He’s got a way of putting his head back, and sort of looking you over, as if he was taking stock of you. It’s not as if he was stuck up or saucy. It’s just a way your father has, too, Miss Rose.”
“Indeed!” Miss Lyndsay was not quite sure she desired any one to resemble her father. “Here we are at the landing.”
“You won’t mind if I ask you, Miss Rose, not to say—there was—anything—anything wrong?”
“No, of course not, if you wish it; but I do want to know,” and then they went away homeward, down the highway of the waters. In fact, as to this matter of which she was not to speak, Rose was vastly curious, and lay long awake that night, smiling at times over the description of the dwellers at the Island Camp.
Dorothy slipped away up the ox-road, from the river-bank opposite the Cliff Camp, and went with slow and unusually thoughtful steps through the wood. At the gate of their clearing she found Hiram, as usual, waiting for her like a patient dog for the master.
“You’ve been a long time,” he said.
“Yes,—I could not help it. Are the cows milked!”
“No. I kind of forgot.”
“Better go and milk them now,” she said; “and don’t forget to feed the hogs, and put the bars up,—one, two, three things,” and she smiled; “mind, three things.”
“Oh, now I’m p’inted right. I’ll go. The bars, you said?”