Once I retorted, “You were thinking of that Tom McChesney.”
“Ay, that she was, I'll warrant,” snapped her grandfather.
Polly Ann replied, with a merry peal of laughter, “You are both jealous of Tom—both of you. But, Davy, when you see him you'll love him as much as I do.”
“I'll not,” I said sturdily.
“He's a man to look upon—”
“He's a rip-roarer,” old man Ripley put in. “Ye're daft about him.”
“That I am,” said Polly, flushing and subsiding; “but he'll not know it.”
As we rose into the more rugged country we passed more than one charred cabin that told its silent story of Indian massacre. Only on the scattered hill farms women and boys and old men were working in the fields, all save the scalawags having gone to join Rutherford. There were plenty of these around the taverns to make eyes at Polly Ann and open love to her, had she allowed them; but she treated them in return to such scathing tirades that they were glad to desist—all but one. He must have been an escaped redemptioner, for he wore jauntily a swanskin three-cornered hat and stained breeches of a fine cloth. He was a bold, vain fellow.
“My beauty,” says he, as we sat at supper, “silver and Wedgwood better become you than pewter and a trencher.”
“And I reckon a rope would sit better on your neck than a ruff,” retorted Polly Ann, while the company shouted with laughter. But he was not the kind to become discomfited.