e. Her sunbonnet had
fallen back a little, disclosing her rustic prettiness.

"I'm much obliged to you," she said quaintly, exhausting her knowledge
of the amenities. "I'll send the hankecher back as soon as I can git it
washed and done up."

The young man smiled graciously, bowed, raised his hat, and waited until
she turned to go; then he bounded down the bank, crashing his way
through the underbrush with the pick.

None of the men below had heard the cry, and Poindexter refused to lash
himself into any retrospective excitement.

"Confound the girl!" fumed Sterling, vexed, after the manner of men,
over the smallest waste of emotion; "why must she frighten a fellow limp
by screaming when she wasn't hurt?"

"Possibly for the same reason that the fellow became limp before he knew
she _was_ hurt," suggested Poindexter; "or she may have thought it an
eminently ladylike thing to do; she looks like a designing creature. If
the killed and wounded are properly cared for, suppose we examine the
result of the blast."

IV.

It was Saturday morning, and Lysander and Melissa were irrigating the
orange-trees. Old Withrow sat by the ditch at the corner of the orchard,
watching them with a feeble display of interest, while two or three of
the children climbed and tumbled over him as if he were some inoffensive
domestic animal.

The old man had hung about the place longer than was his wont, filled
with a maudlin glee over his own importance as having been in some way
instrumental in the trade with Forrester; and he had followed Lysander
to the orchard this morning with a confused alcoholic idea that he ought
to be present when the water from Flutterwheel Spring was turned on
for the first time.

"You'll git a big head," he had said to his wife, as he started,--"a
deal bigger head 'n ever. I tole Forrester I'd tell ye it was a good
trade, an' I done what I said I'd do. Forrester knowed what he was doin'
when he got me"--

"G'long, you old gump!" his spouse had hurled at him wrathfully, ceasing
from a vigorous wringing of the mop to grasp the handle with a gesture
that was not entirely suggestive of industry.

The old man had put up his hand and wriggled in between Melissa and
Lysander with a cur-like movement that brought a grim smile to his
son-in-law's face, and made Melissa shrink away from him noticeably. Out
in the orchard, however, he ceased to trouble them, being content to
smoke and doze by the ditch, while the w