asses
on."

"All ready," Cy James replied, and as they left the stable door he
whispered once again, and looked significantly towards Johnson's
Cross-roads:

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!"

The Captain, looking like a gentleman of the knightly ages misplaced in
this forest lair, held the reins standing on the ground, and handed
Hulda in to the seat beside his own with a grace and a blush and a
lisping laugh that, Levin thought, were very fascinating.

"Now, Master Cannon, take your place in the tail of the vehicle," the
Captain said, bowing to Levin, and darting one of those cold, coarse
looks at him that he vouchsafed but for a moment, like a soft cat that
has all the nature of the rabbit except the tiger's glare.

The vehicle was an old wagon without springs, and Levin's seat was a
piece of board, while Hulda's had a back to it, and the Captain had
padded it with a bear's-skin robe. He looked with the most delicate
attention at Hulda, blushed when she looked at him, and, scarcely
noticing the horses, yet having them under nearly automatic control, he
drove out of Patty Cannon's lane and turned into the woods.

Levin cast one long, prying look at Johnson's tavern, wishing he might
have the gift to see through its weather-stained planking and tall blank
roof, and then he watched the road, of hard sand or piney litter, with
here and there a mud-hole or long, puddly rut in it, unravel like a
ribbon behind the wheels among the thick pines.

He also observed the skill with which the Captain threw his long cowhide
whip, a mere strip of rawhide fastened to a stick, awkward in other
hands; but Van Dorn could brush a fly from either of the short, shaggy
Delaware horses with it, and hardly look where he struck or disturb the
horse, and he could deliver a blow with it by mere sleight that made the
animal stagger and tremble with the abrupt pain.

At a little sandy rill, the only one they crossed, a long water-snake
endeavored to escape before the rapid wagon could strike it, but the
Captain rose to his feet quick and cat-like, and projected the long lash
into the roadside, and the snake writhed and bounded in the air almost
cut in two. Then, sitting again and bending so close to Hulda that his
long, downy mustache of gold touched her cheek, Van Dorn said, softly:

"_Que hermoso!_ Young wild-flower, let me take a snake out of your path
also?"

"Which one, Captain?"

"It does not matter. Name any one."