“Nothin'! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens,” said one of the ostlers. “Injins doin' ghost dancin'--or suthin like that--and the passengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar's only one ez dar come--and she's a lady.”
“Yes,” answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall, graceful girl who, waiving the gallant assistance of the station keeper, had leaped unaided from the vehicle. “A lady--and the fort commandant's darter at that! She's clar grit, you bet--a chip o' the old block. And all this means, sonny, that you're to give up that box seat to HER. Miss Julia Cantire don't take anythin' less when I'm around.”
The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards the waiting coach--erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over--he was rather short; through him--he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested with a frank recognition on the driver.
“Good-morning, Mr. Foster,” she said, with a smile.
“Mornin', miss. I hear they're havin' an Injin scare over at the Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein' stumped by a lady!”
“I don't think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them,” returned the young lady indifferently; “besides, they are Eastern people, who don't know Indians as well as WE do, Mr. Foster.”
The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. “Yes, ma'am,” he laughed, “I reckon the sight of even old 'Fleas in the Blanket' over there,” pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, “would frighten 'em out o' their boots. And yet he's got inside his hat the business card o' this gentleman--Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling for the big firm o' Fletcher & Co. of Chicago”--he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; “so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN' was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!”