no stunt to pull off!" roared the nickum
wrathfully. "I'm due at the dance now!"

"You're not coming to the dance.
There's a girl here who doesn't want
you!" rang back the voice of callow chivalry
in the barbarous pipe of the tenderfoot.

And Pem, slipping up from the grass,
her hands to her burning cheeks--for
she had not meant it to go as far as this
-stole back to the piazza, to dance away
from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal
in her heart.

Perhaps she would have felt that this
was too sore a snub to inflict for any
rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps
she would have compelled her boy-knights
to put out in the camp skiff and return
those oars--under pain of not dancing
with them, at all--had she seen the
illuminated column over which the victim's
nose had been so disastrously bent.

It was in every sense a highly colored
description of her father's record-break-
[[227]]

p226 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p227w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p228

v?