Part 7

“But you do hunt; I know it.”

“How?”

“You shot those quail for me the morning after I came. I heard you go out--early--very early.”

“Why, you allowed you slept so well that night, Miss Mayfield.”

“Yes; but there's a kind of delicious half-sleep that sick people have sometimes, when they know and are gratefully conscious that other people are doing things for them, and it makes them rest all the sweeter.”

There was a dead silence. Jeff, thrilling all over, dared not say anything to dispel his delicious dream. Miss Mayfield, alarmed at his readiness with the butterfly illustration, stopped short. They both looked at the prospect, at the distant “Summit Hotel”--a mere snow-drift on the mountain--at the clear sunlight on the barren plateau, at the bleak, uncompromising “Half-way House,” and said nothing.

“I ought to be very grateful,” at last began Miss Mayfield, in quite another voice, and a suggestion that she was now approaching real and profitable conversation, “that I'm so much better. This mountain air has been like balm to me. I feel I am growing stronger day by day. I do not wonder that you are so healthy and so strong as you are, Mr. Jeff.”

Jeff, who really did not know before that he was so healthy, apologetically admitted the fact. At the same time, he was miserably conscious that Miss Mayfield's condition, despite her ill health, was very superior to his own.

“A month ago,” she continued reflectively, “my mother would never have thought it possible to leave me here alone. Perhaps she may be getting worried now.”

Miss Mayfield had calculated over much on Jeff's recumbent position. To her surprise and slight mortification, he rose instantly to his feet, and said anxiously,

“Ef you think so, miss, p'raps I'm keeping you here.”

“Not at all, Mr. Jeff. Your being here is a sufficient excuse for my staying,” she replied, with the large dignity of a small body.

Jeff, mentally and physically crushed again, came down a little heavier than before, and reclined humbly at her feet. Second knock-down blow for Miss Mayfield.

“Come, Mr. Jeff,” said the triumphant goddess, in her first voice, “tell me something about yourself. How do you live here--I mean; what do you do? You ride, of course--and very well too, I can tell you! But you know that. And of course that scarf and the silver spurs and the whole dashing equipage are not intended entirely for yourself. No! Some young woman is made happy by that exhibition, of course. Well, then, there's the riding down to see her, and perhaps the riding out with her, and--what else?”

“Miss Mayfield,” said Jeff, suddenly rising above his elbow and his grammar, “thar isn't no young woman! Thar isn't another soul except yourself that I've laid eyes on, or cared to see since I've been yer. Ef my aunt hez been telling ye that--she's--she--she--she--she--lies.”

Absolute, undiluted truth, even of a complimentary nature, is confounding to most women. Miss Mayfield was no exception to her sex. She first laughed, as she felt she ought to, and properly might with any other man than Jeff; then she got frightened, and said hurriedly, “No, no! you misunderstand me. Your aunt has said nothing.” And then she stopped with a pink spot on her cheek-bones. First blood for Jeff!

Now this would never do; it was worse than the butterflies! She rose to her full height--four feet eleven and a half--and drew her cloak over her shoulders. “I think I will return to the house,” she said quietly; “I suppose I ought not to overtask my strength.”

“You'd better let me go with you, miss,” said Jeff submissively.

“I will, on one condition,” she said, recovering her archness, with a little venom in it, I fear. “You were going home, too, when I called to you. Now, I do not intend to let you leave that bag behind that tree, and then have to come back for it, just because you feel obliged to go with me. Bring it with you on one arm, and I'll take the other, or else--I'll go alone. Don't be alarmed,” she added softly; “I'm stronger than I was the first night I came, when you carried me and all my worldly goods besides.”

She turned upon him her subtle magnetic eyes, and looked at him as she had the first night they met. Jeff turned away bewildered, but presently appeared again with the bag on his shoulder, and her wrap on his arm. As she slipped her little hand over his sleeve, he began, apologetically and nervously,

“When I said that about Aunt Sally, miss, I”--

The hand immediately became limp, the grasp conventional.

“I was mad, miss,” Jeff blundered on, “and I don't see how you believed it--knowing everything ez you do.”

“How knowing everything as I do?” asked Miss Mayfield coldly.

“Why, about the quail, and about the bag!”

“Oh,” said Miss Mayfield.

Five minutes later, Yuba Bill nearly ditched his coach in his utter amazement at an apparently simple spectacle--a tall, good-looking young fellow, in a red shirt and high boots, carrying a bag on his back, and beside him, hanging confidentially on his arm, a small, slight, pretty girl in a red cloak. “Nothing mean about her, eh, Bill?” said as admiring box-passenger. “Young couple, I reckon, just out from the States.”

“No!” roared Bill.