“The one that had him engroppsed,” Cap explained. “For years he was engroppsed in this hellcat—she come from Arundel, too, though you’d never a-guessed it when we found her in Quebec, smelling of perfume enough to knock you over, and wearing a dress that showed her off like a brick powder-magazine!” Cap passed the tin cup to Doc and made a series of gestures with his vast palms, as though he caressed the exterior of a giant hour-glass.

He wagged his head, as at a dangerously pleasant recollection. “Yes sir; she was an Arundel woman, too, same as Phoebe. We got all kinds in Arundel, like everywhere else. Women ain’t no different, wherever you are. They think the same things, and you handle ’em the same way.”

“I s’pose so,” Doc Means sighed. “How was it you handled this hellcat?”

Cap cleared his throat. “By God, she done a good deal of handling herself! Before we got through with her, she had some of us handled nigh into hell—her and that Frenchy she was living with up in Quebec! It’s God’s wonder she didn’t talk Nason into being a British major. You ought to heard what she called Nason when he wouldn’t be one! Called him a pheasant and told him to go back to his cesspool and eat fish-bones.”

Doc Means passed the tin cup to Cap. “She sounds kind of talkative to me,” he opined.

“No,” Cap said, “she didn’t say much, but what she did say made you damned uncomfortable.” Cap growled and spat. “Pretty as a picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry, too—big blue eyes, and yeller hair, and freckles like inside a lily, sort of, and a smell like delicious flowers. Made you want to bite her, kind of.” He spoke with gusto, exclaimed “Hoy!” enigmatically; then drained the tin cup and licked his lips unctuously. “She thought she could do damned near anything with Nason; but she couldn’t! Phoebe wouldn’t let her!” He stared hard at Doc Means. “A hellcat: that’s what she was, and an Arundel woman, by God! Just plain Mary Mallinson; but she Frenched it all up and stuck a ‘de’ in it: Marie de Something—Marie de Summlething—Subblething—don’t it beat hell how those Frenchies think up names you can’t even remember, let alone pronounce?”