he was truly grateful to the young girl and tried to show it; whether he
was emboldened by the childish appeal of the long brown distinguishing
braid down her back, or whether he suddenly found something peculiarly
provocative in the reddish brown eyes between their thickset hedge of
lashes, and with the trim figure and piquant pose, and was seized with
that hysteric desperation which sometimes attacks timidity itself, I
cannot say! Enough that he suddenly put his arm around her waist and
his lips to her soft satin cheek, peppered and salted as it was by
sun-freckles and mountain air, and received a sound box on the ear for
his pains. The incident was closed. He did not repeat the experiment on
either sister. The disclosure of his rebuff seemed, however, to give a
singular satisfaction to Red Gulch.

While it may be gathered from this that the youngest Miss Piper was
impervious to general masculine advances, it was not until later that
Red Gulch was thrown into skeptical astonishment by the rumors that all
this time she really had a lover! Allusion has been made to the charge
that her deafness did not prevent her from perfectly understanding the
ordinary tone of voice of a certain Mr. Thomas Sparrell.

No undue significance was attached to this fact through the very
insignificance and "impossibility" of that individual;--a lanky,
red-haired youth, incapacitated for manual labor through lameness,--a
clerk in a general store at the Cross Roads! He had never been the
recipient of Judge Piper's hospitality; he had never visited the house
even with parcels; apparently his only interviews with her or any of
the family had been over the counter. To do him justice he certainly had
never seemed to seek any nearer acquaintance; he was not at the church
door when her sisters, beautiful in their Sunday gowns, filed into the
aisle, with little Delaware bringing up the rear; he was not at the