Drift from Two Shores | Page 5

of all the places!"
"Well, I never!"
"This DOES exceed everything."
"It's really TOO idiotic for anything."
It was noticeable that while the voices betrayed the difference of age
and sex, they bore a singular resemblance to each other, and a certain
querulousness of pitch that was dominant.
"I reckon I've gone about as fur as I allow to go with them hosses,"
continued the driver suggestively, "and as time's vallyble, ye'd better
unload."
"The wretch does not mean to leave us here alone?" said a female voice
in shrill indignation. "You'll wait for us, driver?" said a masculine voice,
confidently.
"How long?" asked the driver.
There was a hurried consultation within. The words "Might send us
packing!" "May take all night to get him to listen to reason," "Bother!
whole thing over in ten minutes," came from the window. The driver
meanwhile had settled himself back in his seat, and whistled in patient
contempt of a fashionable fare that didn't know its own mind nor
destination. Finally, the masculine head was thrust out, and, with a
certain potential air of judicially ending a difficulty, said:--
"You're to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable or
barn until we want you."
An ironical laugh burst from the driver. "Oh, yes--in the stable or
barn--in course. But, my eyes sorter failin' me, mebbee, now, some ev
you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn of the Kernel's.

Woa!--will ye?--woa! Give me a chance to pick out that there barn or
stable to put ye in!" This in arch confidence to the horses, who had not
moved.
Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted
indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies and a
gentleman. One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion, of
youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and
well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady,
evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the
aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain
piquancy and a dash that was charming. The gentleman was young,
thin, with the family characteristics, but otherwise indistinctive.
With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated by the
driver's whip. Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular outlines of the
cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes. All else was a desolate
expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher than the tussocks of scant
beach grass that clothed it. They were so utterly helpless that the
driver's derisive laughter gave way at last to good humor and
suggestion. "Look yer," he said finally, "I don't know ez it's your fault
you don't know this kentry ez well ez you do Yurup; so I'll drag this yer
team over to Robinson's on the river, give the horses a bite, and then
meander down this yer ridge, and wait for ye. Ye'll see me from the
Kernel's." And without waiting for a reply, he swung his horses' heads
toward the river, and rolled away.
The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose
from the group, but vainly. Then followed accusations and
recrimination. "It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him
meet us at the settlement." "You wanted to take him by surprise!" "I
didn't. You know if I'd written that we were coming, he'd have taken
good care to run away from us." "Yes, to some more inaccessible
place." "There can be none worse than this," etc., etc. But it was so
clearly evident that nothing was to be done but to go forward, that even
in the midst of their wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward
the distant cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating
their verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from
the elder lady.
"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so
incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a
ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.
It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general
conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after
scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to
grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As
they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on
her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and
lisped:--
"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English
shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in
their Sunday clothes!"
Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine
feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp