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Page 27
"You imps!" she cried. "You wicked, wicked little wretches, to
frighten us so! Kitty darling, it is the boys. Look up, darling!
Don't you see? It is our naughty, naughty boys, playing Indian.
After them, Toots! after them, Hilda! We'll give them a lesson
they shall not forget."
"Huh! huh!" shouted the Indians. "Big Chief Hop-toad! big
Medicine-man Put-Squills-In-His-Tea! gobble up the white squaws
for supper! Huh! huh!"
And now the quiet spectator saw a merry sight. The girls flew in
pursuit, the boys fled before them. In and out of the trees,
laughing, shrieking, they doubled and twisted. Hildegarde ran
well, and Bell had not had two years of basket-ball for nothing.
As for Gertrude, she was lithe and long-limbed as a young
greyhound; but even so, they could not catch their tormentors.
The long gray legs twinkled like lightning over the ground. Phil
paused from time to time to shout his warhoop, and Gerald, when he
could find breath, chanted wild scraps of song, accompanied by
frantic gestures:
"My tom, my tom, my tommy-hawk,
With thee I'll make the pale-face squawk:
With thee I'll make them cry 'Oh, lawk!'
My tom, my tom, my tommy-hawk."
Circling round a great tree, he came full upon Hilda, flying in
the other direction, and made a snatch at her green wreath.
"Pale-face squaw shall lose her hat,
Medicine-man will see to that,"
he cried.
"Will he, indeed?" cried Hildegarde. "Catch me if you can, you
odious redskin! I defy you in every withering term that a Cooper
maiden ever invented!"
"Ho! if you are a Cooper maiden, you are nothing but a female!"
said Gerald. "Aha! she turns, she flies! she feels the scalp a-wr-
r-r-r-r-iggling on her head! she fears she'll soon be a female
dead! Ho, ho! Medicine-man! Big Injin! Ho!"
Flying breathless now, Hildegarde darted hither and thither,
hiding under the leaves, dodging behind the tree trunks. Finally,
seeing her foe pausing for an instant behind the bole of a huge
nut-tree, she rushed upon him, and seizing him, shook him
violently. Then she let go her hold and screamed, for it was not
Gerald that she was shaking.
Roger Merryweather stepped forward, unable to keep from smiling at
her face of horror. He felt a little "out of it," perhaps, and
twenty-four seemed a long way from seventeen; but he should not
have watched the girls, he told himself with some severity,
without letting them know he was there. Now this pretty child
regarded him as a double eavesdropper and spy. But his apology was
drowned in the shouts of the boys.
"Hi! here's Roger! hurrah! Roger, Roger! my scientific codger,
come and play Big Injin! The pale-faces are uncommonly game, but
we shall have them all the same. Hi! there goes Dropsy!"
Indeed, at this moment Gertrude tripped over a tree root and fell
headlong; as she fell she caught at Phil's ankle, just as he was
in the act of grasping Bell by the flying tail of her gown;
another moment, and all three were on the ground together in a
confused heap.
"Anybody hurt?" asked Roger, going to pick them up.
"Oh no!" said Bell, sitting up and shaking the pine needles from
her hair. "Toots was underneath, and she makes a noble cushion.
All right, Toots? and how do you come here, Professor?" The three
fallen ones righted themselves, and sat up and panted; seeing
which, the others came and sat down, too, and for a space no one
spoke, for no one had any breath save Roger, and he was laughing.
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