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"But, I say, don't it strike you that the colonel is uncommonly aw sweet on that little Indian girl." "She's no more an Indian girl than you are," replied his friend, with a laugh. "Aw you don't say so?" returned the sportsman, with a slight elevation of his eyebrows. "Let us go," said Manuela, rising; "I am much better, only a little shaken by such a leap. But but I should like another "
Donna Prudencia did not think it necessary to kiss her, but she shook her warmly by the hand, telling her that she was a good girl, and fit to be a Yankee, a compliment which Manuela hardly appreciated. As for Rita, she kissed the girl on both cheeks, and stood holding her hands, gazing at her with wistful eyes. "Ah, Manuela," she cried; "I must not begrudge it to you.
Lawrence Armstrong, irresistibly charmed by the sound, rode up alongside. "Manuela is merry," he said to the guide; "will you not translate, that I may enjoy the joke?" "It is not easy to translate," replied Pedro. "In fact, I doubt if you will see the joke at all. It requires a little knowledge of Manuela's past career to make understanding possible.
"After such recommendation," said the colonel, turning to Manuela, "I suppose you will accept of this steed." The Inca princess accepted it with a beam of gratitude to Quashy, who thereupon mounted the runaway horse, and in a few minutes the whole cavalcade was sweeping over the plain as swiftly as ever. Afternoon brought them to a solitary Gaucho hut.
No, rapid though thought is, it did not convey these ideas to his mind. His one desire after the first unguarded "exclamation" and impulsive grasp of the hand, was to escape from his false position without committing himself, and without giving pain or annoyance to the unprotected girl. And his success was in proportion to his boldness, for Manuela burst into a hearty laugh, and said
I have described her to you enough! I realised that action must be of swiftness, the lightning flash, the volcano fire that I predicted. Do not say that I did not warn you, Marguerite; knowing me, you must have expected from my last letter what must come. I called Manuela to my room, I made pretence that she should arrange my hair.
They were all seated round a fire at supper, in front of the hut. Lawrence sat beside Manuela, as usual, and was taking much pains to teach her the correct pronunciation of an English word, of which she made a wonderful bungle, and seemed to derive much amusement from the fact, to judge from her occasional peals of silvery laughter.
Nevertheless his perplexity remained, and when he went to sleep that night, after gazing long and earnestly up at the bright stars and at the white summits of the Andes which rose in awful grandeur above him, he dreamed that while Quashy was sitting sound asleep with his head on his knees in front of the fire, Manuela availed herself of the opportunity to pour an ocean of hot coffee down his back!
The old man also evinced a considerable amount of curiosity in regard to Manuela, and made one or two attempts to engage her in conversation, but on being informed by Pedro that she belonged to a tribe living half-way between his hunting-grounds and the regions of Patagonia, and that she did not understand his dialect at all, he forbore to question her, and satisfied himself with simply gazing.
The hunter spoke in Spanish, and Lawrence found to his satisfaction that, although he by no means understood all that was said, he had already improved so much in that tongue through his frequent efforts to converse with Manuela, that he could follow the drift at least of the hunter's remarks.
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