"When they can git it," interpolated Mrs. Beedie, with twinkling eyes.
"They are deprived, I will say, by the slowness and seldomness of the express from over the mountains. But if they are a sober set, it is against their will, and that I do maintain," Mrs. Halsing added, turning an unflinching front toward Mrs. Beedie. Then resuming her dissertation to Odalie:--
"But there's one thing that rests on my mind. I can't decide which one it belongs to, Captain Stuart or Captain Demeré. Did ye see--I know ye did--a lady's little riding-mask on the shelf of the great hall. Ye must have seen it,"--lowering her voice,--"a love token?"
"Oh," said Odalie, in a casual tone and with a slight shrug of the shoulders, not relishing the intrusive turn of the disquisition, "a souvenir, perhaps, from the colonies or over seas."
"La, now!" cried Mrs. Halsing, baffled and disconcerted, "you're as French as a frog!"
Recovering herself, she resumed quickly. "It's the deceitfulness of Captain Stuart that sets me agin him. Ye must be obleeged to know he can't abide the Injuns. He keeps watch day and night agin 'em. Yet they think everything o' Captain Stuart! They _all_ prize him. Now don't ye know such wiles as he hev got for them must be deceit?"
Odalie made an effort to say something about magnetism, but it seemed inadequate to express the officer's bonhomie, when Mrs. Halsing continued:
"Ye never know _how_ to take Captain Stuart," she objected. "Before folks he'll behave to Captain Demeré as ceremonious and polite as if they had just met yesterday; but if you hear them talking off together, in another minute he'll be rollicking around as wild as a buck, and calling him 'Quawl--I say Quawl!'"
She evidently resented this familiarity to the dignified officer, and Odalie pondered fruitlessly on the possible ridicule involved in being called "Quawl."
In this remote frontier fort a strong personal friendship had sprung up between the two senior officers which not only promoted harmony in their own relations, but a unanimity of sentiment in the exertion of authority that redoubled its force, for the garrison was thus debarred from the support on a vexed question of the suspicion of a dissentient mind in high quarters. Stuart had chanced to address his friend as "Paul," in a fraternal aside on an unofficial occasion, and one or two of the Indians overhearing it, and unaccustomed to the ceremony of a surname, had thus accosted him,--to Stuart's delight in the incongruity that this familiarity should be offered to the unapproachable Demeré, rather than to himself, whose jovial methods might better warrant the slack use of a Christian name. Moreover, "Paul" was transmogrified as "Quawl," the Cherokees never definitely pronouncing the letter P; and thereafter in moments of expansive jollity Stuart permitted himself the liberty of imitation in saying "Quawl," and sometimes "Captain Quawl."