“I jes’ couldn’t he’p it, Jason,” she said weakly, and the little man threw up his hands with a gesture that spoke his hopelessness over her sex in general, and at the same time an ungracious acceptance of the terrible calamity she had perhaps left dangling over his head.  He clicked the blade of his Barlow knife and rose.

“We better be movin’ now,” he said, with a resumption of his old authority, and pulling in the line and winding it about the cane pole, he handed it to her and started back up the spur with Mavis trailing after, his obedient shadow once more.

On top of the spur Jason halted.  A warm blue haze transfused with the slanting sunlight overlay the flanks of the mountains which, fold after fold, rippled up and down the winding river and above the green crests billowed on and on into the unknown.  Nothing more could happen to them if they went home two hours later than would surely happen if they went home now, the boy thought, and he did not want to go home now.  For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, far down the river, he saw two figures on horseback come into sight from a strip of woods, move slowly around a curve of the road, and disappear into the woods again.

One rode sidewise, both looked absurdly small, and even that far away the boy knew them for strangers.  He did not call Mavis’s attention to them—­he had no need—­for when he turned, her face showed that she too had seen them, and she was already moving forward to go with him down the spur.  Once or twice, as they went down, each glimpsed the coming “furriners” dimly through the trees; they hurried that they might not miss the passing, and on a high bank above the river road they stopped, standing side by side, the eyes of both fixed on the arched opening of the trees through which the strangers must first come into sight.  A ringing laugh from the green depths heralded their coming, and then in the archway were framed a boy and a girl and two ponies—­all from another world.  The two watchers stared silently—­the boy noting that the other boy wore a cap and long stockings, the girl that a strange hat hung down the back of the other girl’s head—­stared with widening eyes at a sight that was never for them before.  And then the strangers saw them—­the boy with his bow and arrow, the girl with a fishing-pole—­and simultaneously pulled their ponies in before the halting gaze that was levelled at them from the grassy bank.  Then they all looked at one another until boy’s eyes rested on boy’s eyes for question and answer, and the stranger lad’s face flashed with quick humor.

“Were you looking for us?” he asked, for just so it seemed to him, and the little mountaineer nodded.

“Yes,” he said gravely.

The stranger boy laughed.

“What can we do for you?”

Now, little Jason had answered honestly and literally, and he saw now that he was being trifled with.

“A feller what wears gal’s stockings can’t do nothin’ fer me,” he said coolly.