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"Oh, poor fool!" she thought in pity for herself, for this was what the Colbury people had been saying all day in their swift, recurrent glances, their half-masked asides, their furtive turning to look after her. And she to have given herself a day of such keen misery unconscious of their covert encomiums! "I live up thar in the wilderness till I jes' don't sense nothin'," she said.
But the treacherous man, it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of assault and battery.
No, 't war summer afore las' with some o' them other Colbury folks, a-fox-huntin', an' a-deer-huntin, an' one thing an' 'nother. I seen 'em a time or two in the woods. An' he kin ride jes' ez good 'mongst the gullies and boulders like ez ef he had been born in the hills. He ain't a-goin' ter be beat easy." "It don't make no differ," retorted Jenks Hollis. "He'll never git no premi-um.
The town faction trembled at the thought that the substantial award of the saddle and bridle, with the decoration of the blue ribbon, and the intangible but still precious secondary glory of the certificate and the red ribbon might be given to the two mountaineers, leaving the crack rider of Colbury in an ignominious lurch; while the country party feared Hollis's defeat by Hackett rather less than that Jenks would be required to relinquish the premium to the interloper Brice, for the young hunter's riding had stricken a pang of prophetic terror to more than one partisan rustic's heart.
However, the officer permitted himself to unbend a trifle under the influence of a hospitable tender of home-made cherry-bounce, "strong enough to walk from here to Colbury," according to the sheriff's appreciative phrase. He was a portly man, with a rolling, explanatory cant of his burly head and figure toward his interlocutor as he talked.
She flashed her great eyes at him with a pretended stare of surprise. "My no!" she exclaimed. "We-uns hev hed the comet ter keep us comp'ny we ain't missed nobody!" He laughed a little, as at a repartee, and then went on: "Waal, the comic war a-cuttin' a pretty showy figger down yander at Colbury. 'Ston-ishin' how much store folks do 'pear ter set on it!
But there was a class of citizens in Colbury who hearkened with elated sentiments to this story of the burning spring.
With the possible collapse of her prospect of living in Colbury, and her ambition to adjust herself to the exigent demands of its more ornate civilization, her natural untrained grace was returning to her.
He was wont, moreover, to go to the teller of the bank at Colbury and demand of that distracted man such of his papers as were from time to time lost or mislaid, having learned from his wife that she had made the official the custodian of his valuables, these being his bank-book, the ancient returned checks, and the unused check-book.
To Theodosia it was all vastly different from the picture she had projected of Colbury with an election in progress. In interest, movement, populousness, it did not compare with a county-court day, which her imagination had multiplied when she estimated the relative importance of the events.
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