“I’d like to go,” she returned; “but I suppose I couldn’t find it alone.”

He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her—­it would be pleasant in the extreme—­when her mother interrupted them from the foot of the stair.

“A sensible girl,” she declared, “would think about seeing the sights of a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this about tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your naked knees.”

Fanny Gilkan’s face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny.  He was filling a pipe, unmoved.  Such a trip as he had outlined, with Fanny, was fastening upon his thoughts.  It would at once express his entire attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.

“You wouldn’t really go,” he said aloud, half consciously.

The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips.  Her coarsely spun dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast.  “I’d like it,” she repeated; “but afterward.  There is father—­”

She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young man.  He would make a good husband.  But that, he added, was in the future; Dan Hesa apparently didn’t want to marry Fanny to-morrow, that week.  Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not injure her in the least.  His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment in general, flamed out in a determination to take her with him if possible.  It would conclusively define, state, his attitude toward “men herding like cattle.”  He did not stop to consider what it might define for Fanny Gilkan.  In the stir of his rebellious self there was no pause for vicarious approximations.  If he thought of her at all it was in the indirect opinion that she was better without such a noodle as Dan Hesa threatened to become.

“I’d get two horses from the Forge,” he continued, apparently to his mildly speculative self; “a few things, not much would be necessary.  That gun you carry,” he addressed Fanny indirectly, “is too heavy.  I’ll get you a lighter, bound in brass.”

She repeated sombrely, leaning with elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, “And afterwards—­”

“I thought you were free of that,” he observed; “it sounds like the town women, the barnyard crowd.  I thought you were an independent person.  Certainly,” he went on coldly, “you can’t mistake my attitude.  I like you, but I am not in the least interested in any way that—­that jour mother might appreciate.  I am neither a seducer nor the type that marries.”