“Why, Lloyd Sherman!” she cried.  “What have you been doing?  Your dress is torn to tatters, and you are so dirty and dusty that I can scarcely believe that you are my child!”

The Little Colonel screwed herself around to look at the back of her dress-skirt, which was torn into a dozen ragged strips, and fluttered behind her in long fringes.  There was a three-cornered tear on the shoulder and a hole in the elbow of her sleeve.

“Reckon I must have toah it gettin’ through a bobwiah fence,” she answered, cheerfully.  “But, look at Eugenia!  She’s as much of a sight as I am, with her hair hangin’ all in her eyes, like an ole witch, and that scratch across her face, and her stockings full of burrs.”

“Joyce is nearly as bad!” cried Eugenia; “both hair ribbons gone, the heel lost off one shoe, grass stains on her dress, and her face red as a turkey gobbler’s, from running so fast.”

“Where have you all been, and what have you been doing?” demanded Mrs. Sherman so emphatically that, with much giggling and exclaiming, they all began to talk at once.

“We met the boys ovah on the pike,” began the Little Colonel, “Malcolm and Keith and Robby, and we were all ridin’ along as polite as anything, when the boys began to tell about the good times they used to have playin’ Indian.”

“But first,” interrupted Joyce, “Keith told about the time they tied his little cousin Ginger to a tree in the woods, and left her there until it was so dark she nearly had a spasm.”

“Yes,” said Eugenia, “and I said what a pity it was that we were too old to play Indian; that I had had the blues all day, and felt that nothing would do me so much good as to get out some place where nobody could hear, and yell and carry on at the top of my voice.  And Malcolm said that, just for once, supposing we’d pretend like we were ten years old, instead of thirteen, and pitch in and have a good ripping, tearing old game of Indian.  It was away up the pike, where there was nothing in sight but a few farmhouses, scattered along the road, and it didn’t seem as if it would make any difference, so we said we would.”

“First thing I knew,” broke in Joyce, “Robby Moore gave an outlandish war-whoop right in my ear, that nearly deafened me, and grabbed me by my hair, yelling he was going to tomahawk me.  And I saw Eugenia go sailing up the road as fast as her horse could carry her, with Keith after her, swinging on to those two long black braids of hers.  You see Lloyd had the advantage of us with her short hair.  They couldn’t scalp her so easily; but Malcolm chased after her like all possessed.”

“Maybe you think it wasn’t excitin’,” said the Little Colonel.  “I felt like a real suah ’nuff Indian was aftah me, and I screeched bloody murdah till you could have heard me almost to the old mill.”