“Would you have me let the critter kill me, jest to keep my promise?” he asked, humour beginning to correct his vexation.
“I don’t see why not,” murmured Miranda. “Anyhow, you’ve got to do without the powder. And you needn’t be frightened, Dave,”—this very patronizingly,—“for your father never carries a gun on our trail, and he’s never needed one yet.”
“Well, then,” laughed Dave, “I’ll try an’ keep my hair on, an’ not be clean skeered to death. Good-by, Kirstie! Good-by, Mirandy! I’ll look ’round this way afore long, like as not.”
“Inside of twelve years?” said Kirstie, with a rare smile, which robbed her words of all reproach.
“Likely,” responded Dave, and he swung off with long, active strides down the trail.
Miranda’s eyes followed him with reluctance.
Chapter XIII
Milking-time
Young Dave Titus was not without the rudiments of a knowledge of woman, few as had been his opportunities for acquiring that rarest and most difficult of sciences. He made no second visit to the cabin in the clearing till he had kept Miranda many weeks wondering at his absence. Then, when the stalks were whitey grey, and the pumpkins golden yellow in the corn-field, and the buckwheat patch was crisply brown, and the scarlet of the maples was beginning to fade out along the forest edges, he came drifting back lazily one late afternoon, just as the slow tink-a-tonk of the cow-bells was beginning the mellow proclamation of milking-time and sundown. The tonic chill of autumn in the wilderness open caught his nostrils deliciously as he emerged from the warmer stillness of the woods. The smell, the sound of the cow-bells,—these were homely sweet after the day-long solitude of the trail. But the scene—the grey cabin lifted skyward on the gradual swell of the fields—was loneliness itself. The clearing seemed to Dave a little beautiful lost world, and it gave him an ache at the heart to think of the years that Miranda and Kirstie had dwelt in it alone.
Just beyond the edge of the forest he came upon Kroof, grubbing and munching some wild roots. He spoke to her deferentially, but she swung her huge rump about and firmly ignored him. He was anxious to win the shrewd beast’s favour, or at least her tolerance, both because she had stirred his imagination and because he felt that her good-will would be, in Miranda’s eyes, a most convincing testimonial to his worth. But he wisely refrained from forcing himself upon her notice.
“Go slow, my son, go slow. It’s a she; an’ more’n likely you don’t know jest how to take her,” he muttered to himself, after a fashion acquired in the interminable solitude of his camp. Leaving Kroof to her moroseness, he hastened up to the cabin, in hopes that he would be in time to help Kirstie and Miranda with the milking.