“I never see that air Miller, no odds how well I be,” she remarked mechanically to the tea-pot, “but what I feel weak creepin’s come over me.  He puts dye-stuff on his baird.  An’ when a man’s whiskers is gray an’ his head keeps black, it’s a sign he uses his jaw more’n he does his brains.  An’ that yaller-headed doll-baby o’ his’n—­the peert thing:—­I’ll lay fifty cents she never washed a dish.  To think o’ her sayin’ a thing like that about Markis-dee!—­an’ there’s more o’ the Peables in him to-day—­But I s’pose she don’t know no better.”  And Mrs. Ruggles rose from the table, while the corner of her apron made a sudden journey to the corner of her eye.  It was evident her moral nature had received a wound that rankled.

A year before this time the marquis and his playmates had watched several vigorous fellows plant a theodolite on the bank of Crawfish Creek, very much as the natives must have watched the Spaniards plant their first cross on San Salvador.  The contract for grading the new railway bed was in the hands of a stranger named Miller, who was said to have known better days, and in the time of his prosperity had been thought a proper person to be called Colonel.  He was a bluff man of forty years, who appeared to have known both the ups and downs of life, and whose determination to wear a black beard was equaled only by its determination to be gray.  Rumor said that he had been a railroad president, that he made and spent vast sums of money, and that his home was somewhere in the East.

His only child, Alice, ten or twelve years old, bright, fair, full of animal spirits, who was indulged to the last degree by the roughly generous colonel, sometimes accompanied him about the half-developed country, searching for strange birds and blossoms in the woods or watching demurely the laborers ply their picks and shovels while he inspected their work.

The two rode almost daily between Thompson City and the line of excavation, passing the house of Mrs. Ruggles and a cool spring by the roadside near it, whence that lady had obtained the water which made the tea which was stirred into the maelstrom which has been described.  While obtaining it, clad in her working garb, the patter of hoofs and a clear girlish laugh—­sweet as the carol of a meadow lark—­came ringing along the road.  As the colonel and Alice halted to let her high-mettled pony and his heavier Morgan drink, Mrs. Ruggles, who could not otherwise escape observation, with becoming pride and modesty stepped behind the thick willows, leaving the marquis with a pail of water between his legs and a bunch of mottled feathers in his hand.

He stood dumb before the lovely girl, with her face sparkling from exercise and enjoyment, and her golden hair escaping from its prison of blue ribbons.  While the horses drank she espied a cluster of cool violets brightening the damp grass near the spring.  The marquis had presence of mind enough left to step forward and pluck them.  Her “Thank you!” added greatly to his embarrassment, which he expressed by vigorously twisting the mottled feathers.