John Stevens' Courtship

After prayers, the people dispersed to their tents to finish preparations for rest, or to join in dance and song around camp fires or in the great boweries.

At the Winthrop tent, Rachel was completing her camp arrangements.

"Just see 'Enry B'yle 'ang 'round Di," muttered Dian's brother Harvey to his chums as they carried bundles and boxes from the wagons to the tents, "He is too fine to chop and dig; he leaves that to John and father."

"I'm going to tell mother to set him to work, said Lucy, who at once ran to put her threat into execution.

"Miss Diantha, what can I do to help you?" asked the gallant young man, on receiving the hint from frank Rachel Willis. Thereupon he took bundles and parcels from the girl, she laughing again and again at his awkward attempts to be useful around a camp fire.

The camp-fires, now began to shoot steady flames into the darkening sky; the squeak, squeak of the fiddles was answered by the toot of the brass horns, and martial and stringed bands united their forces in loud, triumphant invitations to "dance."

And how they danced! Old and young, short and tall, fat and slim – the temporary floor groaning and shivering beneath the hundreds of merry, flying, stamping feet.

Huge camp fires, all over the valley, flung dancing flames and sparks high into the fleecy evening clouds, while at each corner of the pavilion, great pine trees, brought from the hills and set upright for the purpose, burned a spicy, fragrant glowing radiance into every crevice and corner of the bowered halls.

"Are you going to dance with me?" drawled John Stevens, through his long beard, as he suddenly appeared at Diantha's side. She stood in the brilliant light of the burning pine tree, near the bowery, her tall, graceful figure melting into divine curves under the simple, white frock she wore, her arms uncovered to the elbow and her lovely neck just bared to show the proud lines which dipped in smooth beauty from ear-tips to shoulders. Her columned throat pulsated with bounding life under the snowy skin, as she moved her pretty head from side to side, while the crown of her yellow hair which was coronaded in heavy braids around and around the shapely head, broke into tiny curls on her temples and at the white nape of the neck, and was a glittering mass of spun gold in the dancing flames which heightened both color and quality of that mass of silken charm.

"Why, of course, I am, if you ask me to," Dian replied frankly.

She knew John was not much of a dancer, being very tall, and not very fond of gyrating around as rapidly as the swift music demanded. However, she took his arm and they walked out upon the floor; a waltz was called, and then the girl looked up in her companion's face with a dismayed glance, and he gazed at her with a quizzical response to her misgiving. Of all dances, he was least at home in a waltz.

Once, – twice, – they tried to turn around but without much success. They stumbled over other couples on the floor. In spite of Dian's heroic efforts to keep her giant upright and in time with the step, he stopped suddenly and exclaimed: "I think we shall have to call that a failure."

She looked up quickly to see if there was not a shade of disappointment on his face, and she rejoiced with a wicked joy, when dapper young Henry Boyle came up immediately and carried her off to dance, with all the grace and rhythm that was so necessary a part of a perfect waltz.

They passed John once or twice, as he stood under the blazing pine, stroking his beard and watching the dancers with an inscrutable expression.

Diantha forgot him by and by, and did not again think of him, for her time was so filled with calls for dances that she had no time to think of anybody or anything but her own excited self.

After a few hours of dancing, the girl accepted Henry Boyle's invitation to walk out around camp awhile, and together they traversed the small valley. As they passed their own camp-fire, where sat her sister-in-law, Rachel Winthrop, chatting with Aunt Clara, she suddenly wondered where John Stevens had been all the evening.

"Have you seen John, this evening?" she asked Rachel.

"Yes, he has been here, once or twice, getting some cakes and milk for himself and partner, I guess, for he took two plates."

"I thought I was his partner up here," said Diantha, in a somewhat injured tone.

"Haven't you seen him this evening?" queried Aunt Clara Tyler.

"Oh, yes, but I have been dancing so hard, I forgot all about him."

"You may find some day, Dian, that two can play at the forgetting game," said Aunt Clara, with a tenderness that robbed the speech of any bitterness.

"I wish they would," answered the girl indifferently.

Nevertheless her vanity was touched, a few moments after, when she and her companion passed a rustic bower of boughs, twined and twisted into a lovely green retreat, where there was a small camp-fire smouldering in front, and a low couch inside, covered with softest buffalo robes, whereon sat her dearest friend, Ellen Tyler; and stretched out with his long legs to the fire, his arm supporting his head, and his face turned very intently to the young girl near him, was that recreant, John Stevens, who ought just now to be suffering all the torments of a discarded lover.

It was annoying to say the least. Dian acted as if she did not see them at all, and whispered with much animation to her companion, as they passed the light of the fire.

She hurried at once to the bowery and none were more sprightly and gay until the ten o'clock bugle sounded throughout the valley, and then she allowed Henry Boyle to accompany her to the tent where the elder ones still sat chatting and enjoying themselves.

Diantha Winthrop was pre-eminently sensible. She was sometimes annoyed with the frequent compliments she received as to this trait of her character. She was rarely angry with people; she never gossiped about anybody, and if she had nothing good to say, she rarely said anything at all. She was not impulsive, nor was she unduly swayed by her emotions, deep as they sometimes were. She acted upon mature thought, and only the few who were her intimate friends, really knew the value of her sterling character.

Henry begged his companion to stroll up the hill-side a little, just fairly out of range of the jokers by the camp-fire, and the girl was the more willing because of that other couple under the pines across the tiny valley.

"Here you are, Dian," cried out Rachel. "I was just wondering if you would not like to get that pop-corn and pop some for the crowd."

But Henry was still begging under his breath, for her to come up in the shadow of the pines, and away from the crowd.

"Can't Lucy and Josephine pop the corn, Rachel?" asked Dian, at last.

Both children protested their utter weariness.

"Ah, child," said young Boyle, patronizingly to little Lucy, "just pop the corn, like the leddy you are."

"I'm not a 'leddy'," flashed the child back, "and I don't think it's fair, so there."

"Don't cry," still teased the young fellow; "do be a good girl," then joking in his rather clumsy fashion, he added, "Come and kiss yoo papa."

"Never mind, youngsters," sang out Tom Allen, "I'll help you," while Harvey and Josephine both flew to assist Lucy Winthrop.

Lucy sprang into the tent in an angry flame, while her mother followed, herself too annoyed at the liberty the young man had taken to answer at all. But she soothed the two little girls, and they all came out and finished the corn. Rachel herself carried some up to Henry and Dian, who now sat cozily far up on the hill-side, under the dense shadow of the trees.

The younger ones slipped away from the fire, and the laughter and song there died down; but the young couple still sat under the dark shadow, far up on the hill-side.

Henry was entertaining Dian with long tales about his former home in the British Isles. He gave glowing pictures of the castle belonging to a distant relative in Staffordshire. The girl listened with increasing interest; for who could fail to sympathize with the neglected cousin, even if a third one, of a real lord and earl. The narrator's allusions to himself were a little broad and fulsome, but Dian was inexperienced, if shrewd by nature. A feeling of deeper respect for this good looking and highly connected youth was growing momentarily in her breast – he certainly was such a fine dancer, and he always picked up a handkerchief so gracefully! She could but feel flattered by these confidential revelations of superior virtues and titled relations. The sounds were hushed from tree to tree, and the canopy of silence was unfolding in all the majesty of the mid-night hour.

Suddenly there was a pounding crash and roar above them on the hill-crest, and down through the brush and trees came bounding some terrible wild animal.

Dian screamed, and Henry jumped wildly in the air, yelling at the top of his voice.

"Run, run; it's a bear."

He took his own advice so quickly that the girl was barely on her feet before he was half-way down to the camp fire, still yelling, "Run, Run!"

As the young man reached the full blaze of the fire, a quick chorus of childish voices, above them on the hill-side from which he had fled, high falsettos, trebels, and one deep bass voice, united in a blasting sing-song:

"Come and kiss yoo papa; come and kiss yoo papa."

And the children, in one derisive row of merciless tormentors, stood just in the upper shadow line, repeating the refrain with painful insistence, until Boyle himself was glad to retreat into the silence of his own tent for the night. There were sounds of laughter from every near-by tent. What Dian thought of this absurd adventure could only be conjectured from the scornful expression of her rosy lips, as she gathered the two little girls in her arms and drove the still jeering boy, Harvey, and Tom Allen in the darkened back-ground, away into the far seclusion of their own tent.

But even as she fled, she heard in the near distance another shrill cat-call, "Come and kiss yoo papa." And she joined with one smothered hysterical burst of laughter, the two girls, who were still in her arms, in laughing at their discomfited enemy.

III

"COME AND KISS YOO PAPA"

It was barely five o'clock the next morning, and long before the lazy sun would climb the high eastern hill, when Brother Duzett's drums rattled and rolled their startling reveille, echoing from peak to peak. In a moment, the quick bustle of camp life broke the stillness of dawn, and the neigh of the tethered horses, and the low of the oxen in the meadow, added a note of surprised domesticity to that wild scene. Then, before these sounds were fairly through echoing and re-echoing across the silver sheeted lake, two rounds from Uncle Dimick Huntington's cannon ware answered by two others across the vale fired from Elisha Everett's fieldpiece. The booming volleys were swept from crag to crag, and went rolling and tumbling in wild confusion down the canyon's winding glens, and were just losing themselves in silence, when the three brass bands united in one great glowing tribute to liberty, in the entrancing melody of the loved "Yankee Doodle." After this even the children could sleep no longer, but dressed as best they could with half-frozen fingers in the dim dawn of the snow-cooled air.