While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft,
the breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so
that some loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy
little hunchback did leap with surprising activity; but the
treacherous brown hand went higher, so high that the combined
altitude of his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms
was overcome. Again and again he sprang vainly into the air
comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.

"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she laughingly
remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they are offered to
you. What a clumsy bungler you are."

"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously happy grin,
and immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up which he began
scrambling almost as fast as a squirrel.

When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold
on a crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him
down, despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed
in the soft earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive
leg almost vertically erect.

It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite
unconscious of it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her
plump cheeks, her forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white
and shapely while its muscles rippled on account of the jerking
and kicking of Jean.