Good Indian by B. M. Bower (best beach reads of all time .txt) 📗

to tell you the truth, I didn't think anything much about it. It was just business, and when I'm with you, Miss Goldilocks, I like to forget my troubles. You,” he declared, his eyes glowing upon her, “are the antidote. And you wouldn't have mo believe you could possibly be jealous!”

“No,” said Evadna, in a more amiable tone. “Of course I'm not. But I do think you showed a—well, a lack of confidence in me. I don't see why I can't help you share your troubles. You know I want to. I think you should have told me, and let me help. But you never do. Just for instance—why wouldn't you tell me yesterday where you were before breakfast? I know you were SOMEWHERE, because I looked all over the place for you,” she argued naively. “I always want to know where you are, it's so lonesome when I don't know. And you see—”

She was interrupted at that point, which was not strange. The interruption lasted for several minutes, but Evadna was a persistent little person. When they came back to mundane matters, she went right on with what she had started out to say.

“You see, that gave old Hagar a chance to accuse you of—well, of a MEETING with Georgie. Which I don't believe, of course. Still, it does seem as if you might have told me in the first place where you had been, and then I could have shut her up by letting her see that I knew all about it. The horrid, mean old THING! To say such things, right to your face! And—Grant, where DID she get hold of that knife, do you suppose—and—that—bunch of—hair?” She took his hand of her own accord, and patted it, and Evadna was not a demonstrative kind of person usually. “It wasn't just a tangle, like combings,” she went on slowly. “I noticed particularly. There was a lock as large almost as my finger, that looked as if it had been cut off. And it certainly WAS Georgie's hair.”

“Georgie's hair,” Good Indian smilingly asserted, “doesn't interest me a little bit. Maybe Hagar scalped Miss Georgie to get it. If it had been goldy, I'd have taken it away from her if I had to annihilate the whole tribe, but seeing it wasn't YOUR hair—”

Well, the argument as such was a poor one, to say the least, but it had the merit of satisfying Evadna as mere logic could not have done, and seemed to allay as well all the doubt that had been accumulating for days past in her mind. But an hour spent in a hammock in the shadiest part of the grove could not wipe out all memory of the past few days, nor quiet the uneasiness which had come to be Good Indian's portion.

“I've got to go up on the hill again right after dinner, Squaw-with-sun-hair,” he told her at last. “I can't rest, somehow, as long as those gentlemen are camping down in the orchard. You won't mind, will you?” Which shows that the hour had not been spent in quarreling, at all events.

“Certainly not,” Evadna replied calmly. “Because I'm going with you. Oh, you needn't get ready to shake your head! I'm going to help you, from now on, and talk law and give advice and 'scout around,' as you call it. I couldn't be easy a minute, with old Hagar on the warpath the way she is. I'd imagine all sorts of things.”

“You don't realize how hot it is,” he discouraged.

“I can stand it if you can. And I haven't seen Georgie for DAYS. She must get horribly lonesome, and it's a perfect SHAME that I haven't been up there lately. I'm sure she wouldn't treat ME that way.” Evadna had put on her angelic expression. “I WOULD go oftener,” she declared virtuously, “only you boys always go off without saying anything about it, and I'm silly about riding past that Indian camp alone. That squaw—the one that caught Huckleberry the other day, you know—would hardly let go of the bridle. I was scared to DEATH, only I wouldn't let her see. I believe now she's in with old Hagar, Grant. She kept asking me where you were, and looked so—”

“I think, on the whole, we'd better wait till after supper when it's cooler, Goldenhair,” Good Indian observed, when she hesitated over something she had not quite decided to say. “I suppose I really ought to stay and help the boys with that clover patch that Mother Hart is worrying so about. I guess she thinks we're a lazy bunch, all right, when the old man's gone. We'll go up this evening, if you like.”

Evadna eyed him with open suspicion, but if she could read his real meaning from anything in his face or his eyes or his manner, she must have been a very keen observer indeed.

Good Indian was meditating what he called “making a sneak.” He wanted to have a talk with Miss Georgie himself, and he certainly did not want Evadna, of all people, to hear what he had to say. For just a minute he wished that they had quarreled again. He went down to the stable, started to saddle Keno, and then decided that he would not. After all, Hagar's gossip could do no real harm, he thought, and it could not make much difference if Miss Georgie did not hear of it immediately.