“The pink tam-o’-shanter girl!” said Aggie.  “I begin to understand.”

“But,” he added, “near us also lived a red-headed boy.  She liked him very much, and even in the long-ago days I was fiercely jealous of him.  It may surprise you to know that in those days I longed—­fairly longed—­for red hair and a red mustache.”

“I hate to interrupt,” said Hutchins; “but did he have a mustache as a boy?”

He ignored her.  “We three grew up together.  The girl is beautiful—­you’ve probably noticed that—­and amiable.  The one thing I admire in a young woman is amiability.  It would not, for instance, have occurred to her to isolate an entire party on the bosom of a northern and treacherous river out of pure temper.”

“To think,” said Aggie softly, “that she is just over there by the camp-fire!  Don’t you suppose, if she loves you, she senses your nearness?”

“That’s it exactly,” he replied in a gloomy voice, “if she loves me!  But does she?  In other words, has she come up the river to meet me or to meet my rival?  She knows we are here.  Both of us have written her.  The presence of one or the other of us is the real reason for this excursion of hers.  But again the question is—­which?”

Here the match he was holding under the cigarette burned his fingers and he flung it overboard with a violent gesture.

“The detective, of course,” said Tish.  “I knew it from the beginning of your story.”

“The detective,” he assented.  “You see his very profession attracts.  There’s an element of romance in it.  I myself have kept on with my father and now run the—­er—­livery stable.  My business is a handicap from a romantic point of view.

“I am aware,” Mr. McDonald went on, “that it is not customary to speak so frankly of affairs of this sort; but I have two reasons.  It hurts me to rest under unjust suspicion.  I am no spy, ladies.  And the second reason is even stronger.  Consider my desperate position:  In the morning my rival will see her; he will paddle his canoe to the great rock below your camp and sing his love song from the water.  In the morning I shall sit here helpless—­ill, possibly—­and see all that I value in life slip out of my grasp.  And all through no fault of my own!  Things are so evenly balanced, so little will shift the weight of her favor, that frankly the first one to reach her will get her.”

I confess I was thrilled.  And even Tish was touched; but she covered her emotion with hard common sense.

“What’s her name?” she demanded.

“Considering my frankness I must withhold that.  Why not simply refer to her as the pink tam-o’-shanter—­or, better still and more briefly, the P.T.S.?  That may stand for pink tam-o’-shanter, or the Person That Smiles,—­she smiles a great deal,—­or—­or almost anything.”

“It also stands,” said Hutchins, with a sniff, “for Pretty Tall Story.”

Tish considered her skepticism unworthy in one so young, and told her so; on which she relapsed into a sulky silence.