Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/118

106 and Winchester Carson, all of whom Kenneth had met at Colonel Peyton's barbecue. Add also a small mischievous dark girl of sixteen, named Stella Maynard and a good deal of a nuisance in a gadfly fashion, and her brother John. Kenneth liked and patronized the "kids," as he looked on these fingerlings of the male sex: they made him feel old, important, a man of the world. He admired heartily the young ladies, their sisters, with their vigorous knowledge of out-of-door matters, their cool nerve, their sedate maturity flavoured with an occasional dash of tom-boy.

As was only human nature, especially at this age, he had his sentimental preference; or would have had could he have decided between two. Stella Maynard and Isabelle Carson were out of the running from the start. The former was a little brown thing with a sharp tongue and an unhappy faculty of making you feel that she was not taking you seriously at all points. The latter was too soft and slow and lazy. But between Dora Stanley and Myra Welch it was exceedingly difficult to choose. They were of quite opposite types, so their appeals could not be compared. Dora was quick, vivid in personality, exceedingly active physically, blonde, deep breasted, with a bright, high colour. She could hop on and off her sidesaddle without assistance from anybody; and she opened gates as she came to them, without masculine assistance. You could not "stump" her at anything. Once Kenneth by way of a particularly ridiculous joke said:

"I bet you don't dare ride down that rock slide."

Without a moment's hesitation she turned her horse's head toward the long, nearly perpendicular sweep of water-smoothed granite that dropped from the edge of the trail some fifty or sixty feet to the boulder-strewn creek bed. The animal hesitated, as well he might. Dora set her teeth and raised the short heavy quirt. There seemed no doubt that she intended to force Brownie to make the plunge. But Kenneth, his face pale as paper, crowded forward past Winchester, who sat in apparent paralysis, and laid his hand on her bridle reins.

"Hold on!" he cried, "I was only fooling! Don't you know better than to try that? You'll kill yourself!"