“No, you wouldn’t; men don’t.  My sister soon learned that she wasn’t really the sort of girl to be popular, though she had dozens of proposals, heaps of flowers every day, had to split up each dance several times at a ball, and all that kind of thing.  It was a shock to find out why.  To her face, they called her ‘Princess,’ and she was pleased with the nickname at first, poor thing.  She took it for a compliment to herself.  But she came to know that behind her back it was different; she was the ‘Manitou Princess.’  You see, the money, or most of it, came because father owned the biggest silver mines in Colorado, and he named the principal one ‘Manitou,’ after the Indian spirit.  I shan’t forget the day when a man she’d just refused, told her the vulgar nickname—­and a few other things that hurt.  But I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this.  I wanted to get away from you yesterday, because I—­don’t care to meet people.  Everything seems different though, now.  I suppose it’s because you saved our lives.  I feel as if you weren’t exactly a new person, but as if—­I’d known you a long time.”

“I have the same sort of feeling about you, for some queer reason,” said I.  “Are we also to know each other’s names?”

“No,” he answered quickly.  “That would spoil the charm:  for there is a charm, isn’t there?  But we won’t call each other Brat and Brute any more.  That’s ancient history.  I’ll be for you—­just Boy.  I think I will call you Man.”

“But you hate Man.”

“I don’t hate you.  If I were a girl I might, but as it is, I don’t.  I like you—­Man.”

“And I like you, Boy.  We are pals now.  Shall we shake hands?”

We did.  I could have crushed his little brown paw, if I had not manipulated it carefully.

After that, we did not talk much.  By-and-bye, he was tired, and remounted his donkey, but we still kept side by side, Innocentina sending at intervals a perfunctory cry of “Fanny-anny,” from a distance, by way of keeping the small brown ane to her work.

So we reached the beautiful valley of Aosta, as the transparent azure veil of the Italian dusk was drawn, and out of that dusk glimmered now and then, as if born of the shadows, strange, stunted, and misshapen forms, gnome-like creatures, who stood aside to let us pass along the road.  It was as if the Brownie Club were out for a night excursion; and I remembered my muleteer’s lecture about the cretins of this happy valley.  These were some of them, going back to town from their day’s work in the fields.  I had set my mind upon stopping at a hotel of which Joseph had told me, extolling its situation at a distance from Aosta ville, the wonderful mountain-pictures its windows framed, and a certain pastoral primitiveness, not derogatory to comfort, which I should find in the menage.  But when my late enemy and new chum remarked that he was going to the Mont Blanc, I hesitated.