Little Jason sat still, but he saw Marjorie ride straight for the pony,
he heard her cry to Mavis, saw her wave one hand toward him, and then
Mavis rode for him at a gallop, waving her whip to him as she came. The
boy gave no answering signal, but sat still, hard-eyed, cool. Before
she was within twenty yards of him he had taken in every detail of the
changes in her and the level look of his eyes stopped her happy cry,
and made her grow quite pale with the old terror of giving him offence.
Her hair looked different, her clothes were different, she wore gloves,
and she had a stick in one hand with a head like a cane and a loop of
leather at the other end. For these drawbacks, the old light in her
eyes and face quite failed to make up, for while Jason looked, Mavis
was looking, too, and the boy saw her eyes travelling him down from
head to foot: somehow he was reminded of the way Marjorie had looked at
him back in the mountains and somehow he felt that the change that he
resented in Mavis went deeper than her clothes. The morbidly sensitive
spirit of the mountaineer in him was hurt, the chasm yawned instead of
closing, and all he said shortly was:
"Whar'd you git them new-fangled things?"
"Marjorie give 'em to me. She said fer you to bring yo' hoss in--hit's
more fun than I ever knowed in my life up here."
"Hit is?" he half-sneered. "Well, you git back to yo' high-falutin'
friends an' tell 'em I don't hunt nothin' that-a-way."
"I'll stop right now an' go home with ye. I guess you've come to see
yo' mammy."
"Well, I hain't ridin' aroun' just fer my health exactly."
He had suddenly risen on the fence as the cries in the field swelled in
a chorus. Mavis saw how strong the temptation within him was, and so,
when he repeated for her to "go on back," the old habit of obedience
turned her, but she knew he would soon follow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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