“Why! what has she done now?” It was a general chorus from the guild of glee, excited girls, done to death with weariness, yet tickled all over with the sensation that, much as the vacation had promised them, they had not expected melodrama.
“Gosh! yes. She was at our house to-day, jest a while afore I met you-uns on the valley trail.” The farmer thrust a red lantern up. “I was out diggin’ ’mong the ‘crony hills’, pertater patch; an’ she jest came it all over my wife with some palaver about a good offer we was going to get for this plaguy farm, where rocks _grow_—an’ every one of ’em rooted out means a back ache,” he mopped his face, “knowledge she didn’t have from no nat’ral source, you understand—the Little Lone Lady. She had some kind of a ‘fore-go’, too, ’bout a great cryin’ out there’d be ’mong all the animals ’fore morning. An’ the wife she was so carried away with her that I’m blessed if she didn’t give her a good fat chicken, to carry home in her saddlebag—she allers has that saddlebag bulging, too—an’ the pair o’ red slippers that she was workin’ with roses fer me—cut ’em down to fit her ... she got the red felt f’om her brother who works in an organ factory.”
So this was the load which the trail-bear had carried upon his sore head when he felt that the valley was beyond “God bless you”! There were smothered shrieks from the hay.
“Poor wronged man! You have all our sympathy—all our sympathy!” The Guardian touched his hand. “Can’t you get them back? Won’t she—disgorge?”
“Not much! Not, when she’s ridden off with ’em to her den, her little cabin on a lonely peak, ’bout nine miles from here. She lived there alone all last winter—when she wasn’t on the go, riding round among the mountains—living on crumbs, the neighbors gave her.... Oh! she’s a sleek-gabbed one, but sometimes I think she’s as cracked as she’s sly—and keen.” He sighed.
“It’s easy to see how she comes by her ‘fore-goes’ about the weather and so forth—a radio receiver in that bulky umbrella,” murmured Pemrose.
“Wall, anyhow, I ain’t ‘cock-bird-high’ to be caught by her chaff.” The farmer stamped again. “The women they go an’ see her an’ come back with tales o’ what they hear and see—my wife with a muslin mouth upon her, all stiff and starched, tellin’ about strange water-burn, little cloudy-bright rings an’ shapes floating up from it—some new brand o’ angels, I suppose, visiting with _her_, the Little Lone Lady.”