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>The hand immediately became limp, the grasp conventional.
"I was mad, miss," Jeff blundered on, "and I don't see how you believed it--knowing everything ez you do."
"How knowing everything as I do?" asked Miss Mayfield coldly.
"Why, about the quail, and about the bag!"
"Oh," said Miss Mayfield.
Five minutes later, Yuba Bill nearly ditched his coach in his utter amazement at an apparently simple spectacle--a tall, good-looking young fellow, in a red shirt and high boots, carrying a bag on his back, and beside him, hanging confidentially on his arm, a small, slight, pretty girl in a red cloak. "Nothing mean about her, eh, Bill?" said as admiring box-passenger. "Young couple, I reckon, just out from the States."
"No!" roared Bill.
"Oh, well, his sweetheart, I reckon?" suggested the box-passenger.
"Nary time!" growled Bill. "Look yer! I know 'em both, and they knows me. Did ye notiss she never drops his arm when she sees the stage comin', but kinder trapes along jist the same? Had they been courtin', she'd hev dropped his arm like pizen, and walked on t'other side the road."
Nevertheless, for some occult reason, Bill was evidently out of humor; and for the next few miles exhorted the impenitent Blue Grass horse with considerable fervor.
Meanwhile this pair, outwardly the picture of pastoral conjugality, slowly descended the hill. In that brief time, failing to get at any further facts regarding Jeff's life, or perhaps reading the story quite plainly, Miss Mayfield had twittered prettily about herself. She painted her tropic life in the Sandwich Islands--her delicious "laziness," as she called it; "for, you know," she added, "although I had the excuse of being an invalid, and of living in the laziest climate in the world, and of having money, I think, Mr. Jeff, that I'm naturally lazy. Perhaps if I lived here long enough, and got well again, I might do something, but I don't think I could ever be like your aunt. And there she is now, Mr. Jeff, maki