I wondered if she meant herself; and after thinking over it for two or three days I made up my mind that she did; and then I was provoked at myself for not understanding: but what could I have done or said if I had understood? I remembered, though, how she had skithered[7] back to the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west. I had only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family--Old Man Fewkes, with his bird's claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate Fourth Fewkes with no ideas at all-- [7] A family word, to the study of which one would like to direct the attention of the philologists, since traces of it are found in the conversation of folk of unsophisticated vocabulary outside the Clan van de Marck. Doubtless it is of Yankee origin, and hence old English. It may, of course, be derived according to Alice-in-Wonderland principles from "skip" and "hither" or "thither" or all three; but the claim is here made that it comes, like monkeys and men, from a common linguistic ancestor.--G.v.d.M. "But isn't there a man among them?" she had asked. "A man!" I repeated. "A man that knows how to shoot a pistol, or use a knife," she explained; "and who would shoot or stab for a weak girl with nobody to take care of her." I shook my head. Not one of these was a real man in the Kentucky, or other proper sense: and Ma Fewkes with her boneless shoulders was not one of those women of whom I had seen many in my life, who could be more terrible to a wrong-doer than an army with bowie-knives. "There's only two in the outfit," I went on, "that have got any sprawl to them; and they are old Tom their bunged-up horse, and Rowena Fewkes." "Who is she?" inquired Virginia Royall. "A girl about your age," said I. "She's ragged and dirty, but she has a little gumption." And then she had skipped away, as I finally concluded, to keep Gowdy from seeing her in conversation with me. 3 I pulled out for Manchester with Nathaniel Vincent Creede, whom everybody calls just "N.V.," riding in the spring seat with me, and his carpetbag and his law library in the back of the wagon. His library consisted of _Blackstone's Commentaries_--I saw them in his present library in Monterey Centre only yesterday--_Chitty on Pleading_, the _Code of Iowa of_ 1850, the _Session Laws_ of the state so far as it had any session laws--a few thin books bound in yellow and pink boards. Even these few books made a pretty heavy bundle for a man to carry in one hand while he lugged all his other worldly goods in the other.