ez yer wos Comanches, and frightening all the women folk within
miles--that's your huntin'! You've been climbin' down Paw's old slide
at last, and makin' tracks for here to save the skins of them condemned
government horses of the Kempany! And THAT'S your huntin'!"

To Hale's surprise, a burst of laughter from the party followed this
speech. He tried to join in, but this ridiculous summary of the result
of his enthusiastic sense of duty left him--the only earnest believer
mortified and embarrassed. Nor was he the less concerned as he found the
girl's dark eyes had rested once or twice upon him curiously. Zenobia
laughed too, and, lazily turning the chair around, dropped into it. "And
by this time George Lee's loungin' back in his chyar and smokin' his
cigyar somewhar in Sacramento," she added, stretching her feet out to
the fire, and suiting the action to the word with an imaginary cigar
between the long fingers of a thin and not over-clean hand.

"We cave, Zeenie!" said Rawlins, when their hilarity had subsided to a
more subdued and scarcely less flattering admiration of the unconcerned
goddess before them. "That's about the size of it. You kin rake down the
pile. I forgot you're an old friend of George's."

"He's a white man!" said the girl decidedly.

"Ye used to know him?" continued Rawlins.

"Once. Paw ain't in that line now," she said simply.

There was such a sublime unconsciousness of any moral degradation
involved in this allusion that even Hale accepted it without a shock.
She rose presently, and, going to the little sideboard, brought out