“You imps!” she cried.  “You wicked, wicked little wretches, to frighten us so!  Kitty darling, it is the boys.  Look up, darling!  Don’t you see?  It is our naughty, naughty boys, playing Indian.  After them, Toots! after them, Hilda!  We’ll give them a lesson they shall not forget.”

“Huh! huh!” shouted the Indians.  “Big Chief Hop-toad! big Medicine-man Put-Squills-In-His-Tea! gobble up the white squaws for supper!  Huh! huh!”

And now the quiet spectator saw a merry sight.  The girls flew in pursuit, the boys fled before them.  In and out of the trees, laughing, shrieking, they doubled and twisted.  Hildegarde ran well, and Bell had not had two years of basket-ball for nothing.  As for Gertrude, she was lithe and long-limbed as a young greyhound; but even so, they could not catch their tormentors.

The long gray legs twinkled like lightning over the ground.  Phil paused from time to time to shout his warhoop, and Gerald, when he could find breath, chanted wild scraps of song, accompanied by frantic gestures: 

    “My tom, my tom, my tommy-hawk,
     With thee I’ll make the pale-face squawk: 
     With thee I’ll make them cry ‘Oh, lawk!’
     My tom, my tom, my tommy-hawk.”

Circling round a great tree, he came full upon Hilda, flying in the other direction, and made a snatch at her green wreath.

    “Pale-face squaw shall lose her hat,
     Medicine-man will see to that,”

he cried.

“Will he, indeed?” cried Hildegarde.  “Catch me if you can, you odious redskin!  I defy you in every withering term that a Cooper maiden ever invented!”

“Ho! if you are a Cooper maiden, you are nothing but a female!” said Gerald.  “Aha! she turns, she flies! she feels the scalp a-wr-r-r-r-r-iggling on her head! she fears she’ll soon be a female dead!  Ho, ho!  Medicine-man!  Big Injin!  Ho!”

Flying breathless now, Hildegarde darted hither and thither, hiding under the leaves, dodging behind the tree trunks.  Finally, seeing her foe pausing for an instant behind the bole of a huge nut-tree, she rushed upon him, and seizing him, shook him violently.  Then she let go her hold and screamed, for it was not Gerald that she was shaking.

Roger Merryweather stepped forward, unable to keep from smiling at her face of horror.  He felt a little “out of it,” perhaps, and twenty-four seemed a long way from seventeen; but he should not have watched the girls, he told himself with some severity, without letting them know he was there.  Now this pretty child regarded him as a double eavesdropper and spy.  But his apology was drowned in the shouts of the boys.

“Hi! here’s Roger! hurrah!  Roger, Roger! my scientific codger, come and play Big Injin!  The pale-faces are uncommonly game, but we shall have them all the same.  Hi! there goes Dropsy!”

Indeed, at this moment Gertrude tripped over a tree root and fell headlong; as she fell she caught at Phil’s ankle, just as he was in the act of grasping Bell by the flying tail of her gown; another moment, and all three were on the ground together in a confused heap.