And, seriously now, where did Mr. D. ever get his superb athletic training, because, oh! how all too rare it is to see a brain-worker of strong mentality and a splendid athlete in one and the same man.  Oh, how pathetically she had wished and wished to be a man and take her place out in the world fighting its battles, instead of poor little me who could never be anything but a homebody to worship the great, strong, red-blooded men who did the fighting and carried on great industries—­not even an athletic girl like those dear things up ahead—­and this horse is bobbing up and down like that on purpose, just to make poor little me giddy, and so forth.  Holding her bridle rein daintily she was with the lace handkerchief I’d give her that cost me twelve fifty.

“Mr. D. took it all like a real man.  He said her ignorance of a horse was adorable and laughed heartily at it.  And he smiled in a deeply modest and masterful way and said ’But, really, that’s nothing—­nothing at all, I assure you,’ when she said about how he was a corking athlete—­and then kept still to see if she was going on to say more about it.  But she didn’t, having the God-given wisdom to leave him wanting.  And then he would be laughing again at her poor-little-me horse talk.

“I never had a minute’s doubt after that, for it was the eyes of one fascinated to a finish that he turned back on me half an hour later as he says:  ’Really, Mrs. Pettengill, our Miss Hester is feminine to her finger tips, is she not?’ ‘She is, she is,’ I answers.  ’If you only knew the trouble I had with the chit about that horrible old riding skirt of hers when all her girl friends are wearing a sensible costume!’ Hetty blushed good and proper at this, not knowing how indecent I might become, and Mr. D. caught her at it.  Aggie Tuttle and Stella Ballard at this minute is pretending to be shooting up a town with the couple of revolvers they’d brought along in their cunning little holsters.  Mr. D. turns his glazed eyes to me once more.  ‘The real womanly woman,’ says he in a hushed voice, ‘is God’s best gift to man.’  Just like that.

“‘Landed!’ I says to myself.  ’Throw him up on the bank and light a fire.’

“And mebbe you think this tet-a-tet had not been noticed by the merry throng up front.  Not so.  The shouting and songs had died a natural death, and the last three miles of that trail was covered in a gloomy silence, except for the low voices of Hetty and the male she had so neatly pronged.  I could see puzzled glances cast back at them and catch mutterings of bewilderment where the trail would turn on itself.  But the poor young things didn’t yet realize that their prey was hanging back there for reasons over which he hadn’t any control.  They thought, of course, he was just being polite or something.