“When we got to the picnic place, though, they soon saw that all was not well.  There was some resumption of the merrymaking as they dismounted and the girls put one stirrup over the saddle-horn and eased the cinch like the boys did, and proud of their knowledge, but the glances they now shot at Hetty wasn’t bewildered any more.  They was glances of pure fright.  Hetty, in the first place, had to be lifted off her horse, and Mr. D. done it in a masterly way to show her what a mere feather she was in his giant’s grasp.  Then with her feet on the ground she reeled a mite, so he had to support her.  She grasped his great strong arm firmly and says:  ’It’s nothing—­I shall be right presently—­leave me please, go and help those other girls.’  They had some low, heated language about his leaving her at such a crisis, with her gripping his arm till I bet it showed for an hour.  But finally they broke and he loosened her horse’s sash, as she kept quaintly calling it, and she recovered completely and said it had been but a moment’s giddiness anyway, and what strength he had in those arms, and yet could use it so gently, and he said she was a brave, game little woman, and the picnic was served to one and all, with looks of hearty suspicion and rage now being shot at Hetty from every other girl there.

“And now I see that my hunch has been even better than I thought.  Not only does the star male hover about Hetty, cutely perched on a fallen log with her dainty, gleaming ankles crossed, and looking so fresh and nifty and feminine, but I’m darned if three or four of the other males don’t catch the contagion of her woman’s presence and hang round her, too, fetching her food of every kind there, feeding her spoonfuls of Aggie Tuttle’s plum preserves, and all like that, one comical thing after another.  Yes, sir; here was Mac Gordon and Riley Hardin and Charlie Dickman and Roth Hyde, men about town of the younger dancing set, that had knowed Hetty for years and hardly ever looked at her—­here they was paying attentions to her now like she was some prize beauty, come down from Spokane for over Sunday, to say nothing of Mr. D., who hardly ever left her side except to get her another sardine sandwich or a paper cup of coffee.  It was then I see the scientific explanation of it, like these high-school professors always say that science is at the bottom of everything.  The science of this here was that they was all devoting themselves to Hetty for the simple reason that she was the one and only woman there present.

“Of course these girls in their modest Non Plush Ultras didn’t get the scientific secret of this fact.  They was still too obsessed with the idea that they ought to be ogled on account of them by any male beast in his right senses.  But they knew they’d got in wrong somehow.  By this time they was kind of bunching together and telling each other things in low tones, while not seeming to look at Hetty and her dupes, at which all would giggle