FullReads

“You’re to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable or barn until we want you.”

An ironical laugh burst from the driver. “Oh, yes–in the stable or barn–in course. But, my eyes sorter failin’ me, mebbee, now, some ev you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn of the Kernel’s. Woa!–will ye?–woa! Give me a chance to pick out that there barn or stable to put ye in!” This in arch confidence to the horses, who had not moved.

Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies and a gentleman. One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion, of youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady, evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain piquancy and a dash that was charming. The gentleman was young, thin, with the family characteristics, but otherwise indistinctive.

With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated by the driver’s whip. Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular outlines of the cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes. All else was a desolate expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher than the tussocks of scant beach grass that clothed it. They were so utterly helpless that the driver’s derisive laughter gave way at last to good humor and suggestion. “Look yer,” he said finally, “I don’t know ez it’s your fault you don’t know this kentry ez well ez you do Yurup; so I’ll drag this yer team over to Robinson’s on the river, give the horses a bite, and then meander down this yer ridge, and wait for ye. Ye’ll see me from the Kernel’s.” And without waiting for a reply, he swung his horses’ heads toward the river, and rolled away.

The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose from the group, but vainly. Then followed accusations and recrimination. “It’s YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him meet us at the settlement.” “You wanted to take him by surprise!” “I didn’t. You know if I’d written that we were coming, he’d have taken good care to run away from us.” “Yes, to some more inaccessible place.” “There can be none worse than this,” etc., etc. But it was so clearly evident that nothing was to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst of their wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from the elder lady.

“Where’s Maria?”

“Gone on ahead!” grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.

It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and lisped:–

“You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in their Sunday clothes!”

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon, arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the justice of her gentle daughter’s criticism, and retaliated with simple directness:–