"
In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that
the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or
frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain
kind of pleased curiosity.
"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went into
the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along at a
brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I found."
It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met
Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly
in the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so
incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying
there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity
to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him
with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only
stare at it blankly.
"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"
Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have seemed
a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but presently he
became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand protruding from
the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way and half hidden
by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of cast-off trousers but
for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles to the sky.
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