ssion for her
abstraction, since, without turning her head, she answered slowly and
languidly: "Reckoned I see'd som' un on the stage road. But 'tain't
nothin' nor nobody."

Both voices had in their accents and delivery something of the sadness
and infinite protraction of the plain. But the woman's had a musical
possibility in its long-drawn cadence, while the man's was only
monotonous and wearying. And as she turned back into the room again,
and confronted her companion, there was the like difference in their
appearance. Ira Beasley, her husband, had suffered from the combined
effects of indolence, carelessness, misadventure, and disease. Two of
his fingers had been cut off by a scythe, his thumb and part of his left
ear had been blown away by an overcharged gun; his knees were crippled
by rheumatism, and one foot was lame from ingrowing nails,--deviations
that, however, did not tend to correct the original angularities of his
frame. His wife, on the other hand, had a pretty figure, which still
retained--they were childless--the rounded freshness of maidenhood. Her
features were irregular, yet not without a certain piquancy of outline;
her hair had the two shades sometimes seen in imperfect blondes, and
her complexion the sallowness of combined exposure and alkaline
assimilation.

She had lived there since, an angular girl of fifteen, she had been
awkwardly helped by Ira from the tail-board of the emigrant wagon in
which her mother had died two weeks before, and which was making its
first halt on the Californian plains, before Ira's door. On the second
day of their halt Ira had tried to kiss her while she was drawing water,
and had received the contents of the bucket instead,--the girl knowing
her own value. On the third day Ira had some conversation with
her father regarding locations and stock. On the fourth day this
conversation was continued in the presence of the girl; on the fifth day
the three walked to Parson Davies' house, four miles away, where Ira
and Sue were married. The romance of a week had taken place within the
confines of her present view from the doorway; the episode of her life
might have been shut in in that last sweep of her sandy lashes.

Nevertheless, at that moment some instinct, she knew not what, impelled
her when her husband left the room to put down the dish she was washing,
and, with the towel lapped over her bare pretty arms, to lean once more
against the doorpost, lazily looking down