The young girl’s eyes brightened timidly with a feminine mingling of imaginative awe and personal, pitying interest.  He was, after all, so young and amiable looking for such hardships and adventures.  And with all this, he—­this Indian fighter—­was a little afraid of her!

“Then that’s why you carry that knife and six-shooter?” she said.  “But you won’t want ’em now, here in the settlement.”

“That’s ez mebbe,” said the stranger darkly.  He paused, and then suddenly, as if recklessly accepting a dangerous risk, unbuckled his revolver and handed it abstractedly to the young girl.  But the sheath of the bowie-knife was a fixture in his body-belt, and he was obliged to withdraw the glittering blade by itself, and to hand it to her in all its naked terrors.  The young girl received the weapons with a smiling complacency.  Upon such altars as these the skeptical reader will remember that Mars had once hung his “battered shield,” his lance, and “uncontrolled crest.”

Nevertheless, the warlike teamster was not without embarrassment.  Muttering something about the necessity of “looking after his stock,” he achieved a hesitating bow, backed awkwardly out of the door, and receiving from the conquering hands of the young girl his weapons again, was obliged to carry them somewhat ingloriously in his hands across the road, and put them on the wagon seat, where, in company with the culinary articles, they seemed to lose their distinctively aggressive character.  Here, although his cheek was still flushed from his peaceful encounter, his voice regained some of its hoarse severity as he drove the oxen from the muddy pool into which they had luxuriantly wandered, and brought their fodder from the wagon.  Later, as the sun was setting, he lit a corn-cob pipe, and somewhat ostentatiously strolled down the road, with a furtive eye lingering upon the still open door of the farmhouse.  Presently two angular figures appeared from it, the farmer and his wife, intent on barter.

These he received with his previous gloomy preoccupation, and a slight variation of the story he had told their daughter.  It is possible that his suggestive indifference piqued and heightened the bargaining instincts of the woman, for she not only bought the skillet, but purchased a clock and a roll of carpeting.  Still more, in some effusion of rustic courtesy, she extended an invitation to him to sup with them, which he declined and accepted in the same embarrassed breath, returning the proffered hospitality by confidentially showing them a couple of dried scalps, presumably of Indian origin.  It was in the same moment of human weakness that he answered their polite query as to “what they might call him,” by intimating that his name was “Red Jim,”—­a title of achievement by which he was generally known, which for the present must suffice them.  But during the repast that followed this was shortened to “Mister Jim,” and even familiarly by the elders to plain “Jim.”  Only the young girl habitually used the formal prefix in return for the “Miss Phoebe” that he called her.