“A letter carrier, you think? Oh, how I should like to get love letters by such a postman!”
“You had better hasten on, and tell him so. My horse is at your service.”
“Ha! ha! ha! What a simpleton you show yourself! Suppose, for jesting’s sake, I did have a fancy to overtake this prairie postman! It couldn't be done upon that dull steed of yours: not a bit of it! At the rate he is going, he and his blood-bay will be out of sight before you could change saddles for me. Oh, no! he’s not to be overtaken by me, however much I might like it; and perhaps I might like it!”
“Don’t let your father hear you talk in that way.”
“Don’t let him hear you talk in that way,” retorted the young lady, for the first time speaking in a serious strain. “Though you are my cousin, and papa may think you the pink of perfection, I don’t—not I! I never told you I did—did I?”
A frown, evidently called forth by some unsatisfactory reflection, was the only reply to this tantalizing interrogative.
“You are my cousin,” she continued, in a tone that contrasted strangely with the levity she had already exhibited, “but you are nothing more—nothing more—Captain Cassius Calhoun! You have no claim to be my counsellor. There is but one from whom I am in duty bound to take advice, or bear reproach. I therefore beg of you, Master Cash, that you will not again presume to repeat such sentiments—as those you have just favoured me with. I shall remain mistress of my own thoughts—and actions, too—till I have found a master who can control them. It is not you!”
Having delivered this speech, with eyes flashing—half angrily, half contemptuously—upon her cousin, the young Creole once more threw herself back upon the cushions of the carriole.
The closing curtains admonished the ex-officer, that further conversation was not desired.
Quailing under the lash of indignant innocence, he was only too happy to hear the loud “gee-on” of the teamsters, as the waggons commenced moving over the sombre surface—not more sombre than his own thoughts.
CHAPTER III.
THE PRAIRIE FINGER-POST.
The travellers felt no further uneasiness about the route. The snake-like trail was continuous; and so plain that a child might have followed it.
It did not run in a right line, but meandering among the thickets; at times turning out of the way, in places where the
