Alice of Old Vincennes

								

holding high a tempting cluster of fruit, while a very short,
hump-backed youth looks up with longing eyes and vainly reaches for it.
The tableau is not merely rustic, it is primitive. "Jump!" the girl is
saying in French, "jump, Jean; jump high!"
Yes, that was very long ago, in the days when women lightly braved what
the strongest men would shrink from now.
Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost perfect
figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for the form of
Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not absolutely
beautiful; but the time and the place were vigorously indicated by her
dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply designed. Plainly she was a
child of the American wilderness, a daughter of old Vincennes on the
Wabash in the time that tried men's souls.
"Jump, Jean!" she cried, her face laughing with a show of
cheek-dimples, an arching of finely sketched brows and the twinkling of
large blue-gray eyes.
"Jump high and get them!"
While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft, the
breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so that some
loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy little hunchback
did leap with surprising activity; but the treacherous brown hand went
higher, so high that the combined altitude of his jump and the reach of
his unnaturally long arms was overcome. Again and again he sprang
vainly into the air comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.
"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she laughingly
remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they are offered to you.
What a clumsy bungler you are."
"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously happy grin, and
immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up which he began scrambling
almost as fast as a squirrel.
When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold on a
crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him down,
despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed in the soft
earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive leg almost
vertically erect.
It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite unconscious of
it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her plump cheeks, her
forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white and shapely while its
muscles rippled on account of the jerking and kicking of Jean.
All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand,
shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached them,
and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:
"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What a foolish
fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of the ground,
as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you knew so little
as that."
Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there what
we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in
isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call