"I never had a minute's doubt after that, for it was the eyes of one fascinated to a finish that he turned back on me half an hour later as he says: 'Really, Mrs. Pettengill, our Miss Hester is feminine to her finger tips, is she not?' 'She is, she is,' I answers. 'If you only knew the trouble I had with the chit about that horrible old riding skirt of hers when all her girl friends are wearing a sensible costume!' Hetty blushed good and proper at this, not knowing how indecent I might become, and Mr. D. caught her at it. Aggie Tuttle and Stella Ballard at this minute is pretending to be shooting up a town with the couple of revolvers they'd brought along in their cunning little holsters. Mr. D. turns his glazed eyes to me once more. 'The real womanly woman,' says he in a hushed voice, 'is God's best gift to man.' Just like that. "'Landed!' I says to myself. 'Throw him up on the bank and light a fire.' "And mebbe you think this tet-à-tet had not been noticed by the merry throng up front. Not so. The shouting and songs had died a natural death, and the last three miles of that trail was covered in a gloomy silence, except for the low voices of Hetty and the male she had so neatly pronged. I could see puzzled glances cast back at them and catch mutterings of bewilderment where the trail would turn on itself. But the poor young things didn't yet realize that their prey was hanging back there for reasons over which he hadn't any control. They thought, of course, he was just being polite or something. "When we got to the picnic place, though, they soon saw that all was not well. There was some resumption of the merrymaking as they dismounted and the girls put one stirrup over the saddle-horn and eased the cinch like the boys did, and proud of their knowledge, but the glances they now shot at Hetty wasn't bewildered any more. They was glances of pure fright. Hetty, in the first place, had to be lifted off her horse, and Mr. D. done it in a masterly way to show her what a mere feather she was in his giant's grasp. Then with her feet on the ground she reeled a mite, so he had to support her. She grasped his great strong arm firmly and says: 'It's nothing--I shall be right presently--leave me please, go and help those other girls.' They had some low, heated language about his leaving her at such a crisis, with her gripping his arm till I bet it showed for an hour. But finally they broke and he loosened her horse's sash, as she kept quaintly calling it, and she recovered completely and said it had been but a moment's giddiness anyway, and what strength he had in those arms, and yet could use it so gently, and he said she was a brave, game little woman, and the picnic was served to one and all, with looks of hearty suspicion and rage now being shot at Hetty from every other girl there.