“Now she’s tryin’ to flatter me. Nothin’ doing. We’ll give it out right now that I’m no gentleman,” he replied, impersonally. Then, abandoning his communion with the apple blossoms, he put a question to the young woman who shared the tenancy of the tree with him: “Mind if I smoke?”
“Why should you ask me, since you confess—or do you boast?—that you are no gentleman?”
From the pocket of his shirt he drew tobacco and paper, then rolled a cigarette. “I’m one off an’ on,” he explained. “Whenever it don’t cramp my style, you understand.”
She took advantage of his preoccupation with the “makings,” stepped lightly to a neighbouring branch, swung to a lower one, and dropped easily to earth.
The eyes that looked up at him sparkled triumph. “I wish you luck in your search for that paragon you’re to meet before sunset,” she said.
“I’ll be lucky. Don’t you worry about that,” he boasted coolly. “Only I don’t have to find her now. I’ve found her.”
Then, unexpectedly, they went down into the alfalfa together amid a shower of apple blossoms. For he, swinging from the branch upon which he sat, had dropped, turned his ankle on an outcropping root, and clutched at her as he fell.
The girl merely sat down abruptly, but he plunged cheek first into the soft loam of the plowed orchard. His nose and the side of his face were decorated with débris. Mopping his face with a handkerchief, he succeeded in scattering more widely the soil he had accumulated.
She looked at him, gave a little giggle, suppressed it decorously, then went off into a gale of laughter. He joined her mirth.
“Not that there’s anything really to laugh at,” he presently assured her with dignity.