Flushed, excited, beautiful in her animation, she faced the astounded young man who stared at her wildly through his eye-glasses.
After a while he managed to ask whether she wished him to believe that these four young men had each eloped with their soul mates.
She bit her lip. "To be accurate," she said in a low voice, "somebody eloped with each one of them."
"How? I don't understand!"
"I don't wish you to Good-bye."
"You mean," he demanded, incredulously, "that four girls ran away with these four big, hulking young men?"
"Practically."
"That's ridiculous! Besides, it's impossible! Besides women don't run men off like cattle rustlers. Man is the active agent in elopements, woman the passive agent."
She did not answer.
"Isn't she?"
She made no reply.
He said: "Amourette, shall I illustrate what I mean with you as the passive agent?"
The girl bent over a little, then with a sudden movement she dropped her head in her hands. A moment later he saw a single tear fall between her fingers.
He looked east, west, north, south, and finally up into the sky. Seeing nobody, the silly expression left his otherwise interesting face; a graver, gentler light grew in his eyes. And he put one arm around her supple waist.
"Something is dreadfully wrong," he said; "all this must be explained our strange encounter, our speaking, our talking at cross purposes, our candid interest in each other the sudden, swift, unfeigned friendship that was born the instant that our eyes encountered "
"I know it. It was born. Oh, I know it. I know it, and I could not help it somehow somehow "
"It it was almost like like love at first sight," he whispered.
"It was something like it I am afraid "
"Do you think it was love?"
"I don't know Do you?"
"I don't know You mustn't cry. Put your head down here. You mustn't be distressed."
"I am, dreadfully."
"You mustn't be."
"I can't help it now."
"Could you help it if you loved me?"
"Oh, no! Oh, no! It would distress me beyond measure to to love you. Oh, it must not be it must not happen to me "
"It is already happening to me."
"Don't let it! Don't let it happen to either of us! Please please "
"But it is happening all the while, Amourette."
She drew a swift, startled sigh.
"Is that what it is that is happening to me, too, Mr. Sayre?"
"Yes. I think so."
"Oh, oh, oh!" she sobbed, hiding her face closer to his shoulder.
"Amourette! Darling! Dea "
"L-listen. Because now I've got to tell you all about the disappearance of those perfectly horrid young specimens of physical perfection. And after that you will abhor me!"
"Abhor you! Dearest dearest and most divine of women!"
"Wait!" she sobbed. "I've got myself and you into the most awful scrape you ever dreamed of by falling in love with you at first sight!"
And she turned her face closer to his shoulder and slipped one desperate little hand into his.
IV
ABOUT two o'clock that afternoon Sayre rushed into camp with his scanty hair on end.
Langdon, who had been attempting to boil a blank-book for dinner, gazed at him in consternation.
"What is it? Bears, William?" he asked fearfully. "D-d-don't be f-f-frightened; I'll stand by you."
"It isn't bears, you simp! I've just unearthed the most colossal conspiracy of the century! Curtis, things are happening in these woods that are incredible, abominable, horrible "
"What is happening?" faltered Langdon, turning paler. "Murder?"
"Worse! They've got Willett and the others! She admitted it to me "
"Hey?"
"Willett and Carrick and the others!" shouted Sayre, gesticulating. "They've caught 'em all! She said so! I "
"They? She? Who's caught what? Who's 'they'? What it is? Who's 'she'? What are you talking about, anyway?"
"Amourette told me "
"Amourette? Who the deuce is Amourette?"
"I don't know. Shut up! My head's spinning like a gyroscope. All I know is that I want to marry her and she won't let me and I believe she would if I had a reliable hair-restorer and wasn't near-sighted but she ran away and got inside the fence and locked the gate."
"Are you drunk?" demanded Langdon, "or merely frolicsome?"
"I don't know. I guess I am. I'm about everything else. What do I know about anything anyway? Nothing!"
He began to run around in circles; Langdon, having seen similar symptoms in demented cats, regarded him with growing alarm.
"I tell you it's an outrageous social condition which tolerates such doings!" shouted Sayre. "It's a perfectly monstrous state of things! Nine handsome men out of ten are fatheads! I told her so! I tried to point out to her but she wouldn't listen she wouldn't listen!"
Langdon stared at him, jaw agape. Then:
"Quit that ghost-dancing and talk sense," he ventured.
"Do you think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette that, too; but she wouldn't listen she wouldn't lis My God! Why am I bald?"
He swung his arms like a pair of flails and advanced distractedly upon Langdon, who immediately retreated.
"Come back here," he said. "I want to picture to you the horrors that are going on in your native land! You ought to know. You've got to know!"
"Certainly, old man," quavered Langdon, keeping a tree between them. "But don't come any closer or I'll scream."
"Do you think I'm nutty?"
"Oh, not at all not at all," said Langdon soothingly. "Probably the wafers disagreed with you."
"Curtis, wouldn't it rock any man's equilibrium to fall head over heels in love with a girl inside of ten minutes? I merely ask you, man to man."
"It sure would, dear friend "
"And then to see that divine girl almost ready to love you in return see it perfectly, plainly? And have her tell you that she could learn to care for you if your hair wasn't so thin and you didn't wear eye-glasses? By Jinks! That was too much! I'll leave it to you wasn't it?"
Langdon swallowed hard and watched his friend fixedly.
"And then," continued Sayre, grinding his teeth, "then she told me about Willett!"
"Hey?"
"Oh, the whole thing is knocked in the head from a newspaper standpoint. They've all written home. They're married or on the point of it "
"What!"
"But that isn't what bothers me. What do I care about this job, or any other job, since I've seen the only girl on earth that I could ever stay home nights for! And to think that she ran away from me and I'm never to see her again because I'm near-sighted and partly bald!"
He waved his arms distractedly.
"But, by the gods and demons!" he cried, "I'm not going to stand for her going hunting with that man-net! If she catches any insufferable pup in it I'll go insane!"
Langdon's eyes rolled and he breathed heavily.
"Old man," he ventured, kindly, "don't you think you'd better lie down and try to take a nice little nap "
Langdon's eyes rolled and he breathed heavily.
"Old man," he ventured, kindly, "don't you think you'd better lie down and try to take a nice little nap "
Sayre instantly chased him around the tree and caught him.
"Curt," he said savagely, "get over the idea that there's anything the matter with me mentally except love and righteous indignation. I am in love; and it hurts. I'm indignant, because those people are treating my sex with an outrageous and high-handed effrontery that would bring the blush of impotent rage to any masculine cheek!"
"What people?" said the other warily. "You needn't answer till you get your wits back."
"They're back, Curt; that twelve-foot fence of heavy elephant-proof wire which we noticed in the forest day before yesterday isn't the fencing to a game park. It encloses a thousand acres belonging to the New Race University. Did you know that?"
"What's The New Race University?" asked Langdon, astonished.
"You won't believe it but, Curtis, it's a reservation for the the p-p-propagation of a new and s-s-symmetrically p-p-proportioned race of g-g-god-like human beings! It's a deliberate attempt at cold-blooded scientific selection an insult to every bald-headed, near-sighted, thin-shanked young man in the United States!"
"William," said the other, coaxingly, "you had better lie down and let me make some wafer soup for you."
"You listen to me. I'm getting calmer now. I want to tell you about these New Race women and their University and Amourette and Reginald Willett and the whole devilish business."
"Is there is there really such a thing, William? You would not tell me a bind like that just to make a goat of me, would you?"
"No, I wouldn't. There is such a thing."
"Did you see it?"
"No, I "
"How do you know?"
"Amourette told me shamelessly, defiantly, adorably! It was organised in secret out of the most advanced and determined as well as the most healthy, vigorous, and physically beautiful of all the suffragettes in North America. One of their number happened to own a thousand acres here before the State took the rest for its park. And here they have come, dozens and dozens of them to attend the first summer session of the New Race University."
"Is is there actually a University in these woods?"
"There is."
"Buildings?" demanded Langdon, amazed.
"No, burrows. Isn't that the limit? Curt, believe me, they live in caves. It's their idea of being vigorous and simple and primitive. Their cult is the cave woman. They have classes; they study and recite and exercise and cook and play auction bridge. Their object is to hasten not only political enfranchisement, but the era of a physical and intellectual equality which will permit them to mate as they choose and people this republic with perfect progeny. Every girl there is pledged to mate only with the very pick of physical masculine perfection. Their pledge is to build up a new, god-like race on earth, which ultimately will dominate, crush out, survive, and replace all humanity which has become degenerate. Nothing mentally or physically or politically imperfect is permitted inside that wire fence. My eye-glasses bar me out; your shanks exclude you also your politics, because you're a democrat."
"That's monstrous!" exclaimed Langdon, indignantly.
"More monstrous still, these disciples of the New Race movement are militant! Their audacity is unbelievable! Certain ones among them, adepts in woodcraft, have now begun to range this forest with nets. What do you think of that! And when they encounter a young fellow who agrees with the remorseless standard of perfection set up by the University, they stalk him and net him! They've got four so far. And now it's Amourette's turn to go out!"
Langdon's teeth chattered.
"W-w-what are they g-going to do with their captures?"
"Marry them!"
"Willett? And Carrick and "
"Yes. Isn't it awful, Curt?"
"Was she the girl with the net in the photo? I mean, was that her hand?"
"No; that was a friend of her's who bagged Willett. Amourette started out yesterday for the first time after well, I suppose you'd call it 'big game.' She saw me, stalked me, got near enough to see my glasses, and let me go. And to-day, thinking that she might have been mistaken and that perhaps I only wore sun-glasses, she came back. But I was ass enough to take off my cap to her, and she saw my hair saw where it wasn't and that settled it."
"What a mortifying thing to happen to you, William."
"I should think so. There's nothing unusual the matter with me. Cæsar was bald. It's idiotic to bar a man out because he has fewer hairs than the next man. And the exasperating part of it is that I believe I could win her if I had half a chance."
"Of course you could. If she's any good as a sport, she'd rather have you, hairless myopiac that you are, than a tailor's dummy."
Sayre said: "Isn't it a terrible thing, Curtis, to think of that sweet, lovely young girl pledged to a scientific life like that? P-pledged to p-p-propagate p-p-perfection?"
"What a mean-spirited creature that fellow Willett must be," observed Langdon in disgust; "and the other three Ugh!"
"Why?"
"To tamely submit to being kidnapped and woo'd and wed that way endure the degradation of a captivity among all those young girls "
Sayre said: "Would you call for help if kidnapped?"
Langdon gazed into space: "I wonder," he murmured.
Sayre looked at him searchingly.
"I don't believe you'd make the welkin ring with your yelps. It's probably the same with those four men."
"Probably."
"I don't suppose those suffragettes of the New Race University really require any fence there to keep those men in."
"No; only to keep the rest of us out."
"The chances are that Willett and that poet Carrick and De Lancy Smith and Alphonso W. Green couldn't be chased out of that University."
"Those are the chances. How I hate those four men. It's curious, William, that no man can ever tolerate the idea of any other man ever getting solid with any looker. I always did dislike to see another man with a pretty girl William?"
"What?"
"Think of the concentrated beauty in that University! Think of that rich round-up of creamy dreams! Consider that mellifluous marmalade! And we can't have any because you are slightly bald and near-sighted and I am thin and scholarly!" He ran at the camp-kettle and kicked it.
After a painful silence Sayre said timidly: "Don't laugh, but is there any known substance which will bring in hair?"
"You mean bring it out?"
"Well, dammit, grow it! Is there?"
"There are too many bald monarchs and millionaires to prove the contrary. Nor is there anything that can make my thin shanks fatter."
" I'd be willing to go about without glasses," said Sayre humbly. "I told her so."
"Couldn't you deceive her with a wig? It wouldn't matter afterward. After you're once married let her shriek."
"Amourette saw my head." And he hung it in bitter dejection.
"Come on," said Langdon cheerily. "Let's peek through their fence and see what happens. Much has been done with a merry eye in this world of haughty ladies."
As they turned away into the woods Sayre clenched his fists.
"I'd like to knock the collective blocks off those four young men inside that fence. And to think to think of Amourette going out again to-morrow, man hunting, with her net! I can't endure it, Curt I simply can't."
Langdon looked at his friend in deep commiseration.