“I'm worried about my cousins back thar. I'm afeered somethin' mought happen to 'em.”
Soon they overtook two men on horseback, and after they passed and were fifty yards ahead of them, one of the men lifted his voice jestingly:
“Is that your woman, stranger, or have you just borrowed her?” Hale shouted back:
“No, I'm sorry to say, I've just borrowed her,” and he turned to see how she would take this answering pleasantry. She was looking down shyly and she did not seem much pleased.
“They are kinfolks o' mine, too,” she said, and whether it was in explanation or as a rebuke, Hale could not determine.
“You must be kin to everybody around here?”
“So do I,” she said, smiling now directly at him.
“Good!” he said, and they went on--Hale asking more questions. She was going to school at the county seat the coming winter and she was fifteen years old.
“That's right. The trouble in the mountains is that you girls marry so early that you don't have time to get an education.” She wasn't going to marry early, she said, but Hale learned now that she had a sweetheart who had been in town that day and apparently the two had had a quarrel. Who it was, she would not tell, and Hale would have been amazed had he known the sweetheart was none other than young Buck Falin and that the quarrel between the lovers had sprung from the opening quarrel that day between the clans. Once again she came near going off the mule, and Hale observed that she was holding to the cantel of his saddle.
“Look here,” he said suddenly, “hadn't you better catch hold of me?” She shook her head vigorously and made two not-to-be-rendered sounds that meant:
“Well, if this were your sweetheart you'd take hold of him, wouldn't you?”
Again she gave a vigorous shake of the head.
“Well, if he saw you riding behind me, he wouldn't like it, would he?”
“She didn't keer,” she said, but Hale did; and when he heard the galloping of horses behind him, saw two men coming, and heard one of them shouting--“Hyeh, you man on that yaller mule, stop thar”--he shifted his revolver, pulled in and waited with some uneasiness. They came up, reeling in their saddles--neither one the girl's sweetheart, as he saw at once from her face--and began to ask what the girl characterized afterward as “unnecessary questions”: who he was, who she was, and where they were going. Hale answered so shortly that the girl thought there was going to be a fight, and she was on the point of slipping from the mule.
