out here than we are," remarked the
Captain. "Where we come from, people allow a man to go free after
exhausting all the resources of the law, while here, they quietly hang a
scoundrel when they catch him without making any fuss about it. It's
much simpler, you know."

"Beautiful!" echoed the Colonel.

VIII

After much persuasion and further caustic remarks on the country and a
people whose chief occupation seemed to be that of shooting and hanging
one another, Mrs. Forest was finally induced to enter the house, leaving
Blanch and Bessie seated on the bench beneath the cottonwood tree where
they had collapsed, the result of the shock their nerves had sustained.

Their presence seemed as incongruous with their surroundings as that of
some delicate hot-house flower blooming in the midst of the desert.

"Could you have believed it if you hadn't seen it?" asked Bessie, the
first to break the silence. "Is it all real, or are we still dreaming? I
wish somebody would pinch me, my wits are so scattered," and she passed
her hand across her eyes as though to dispel some dreadful nightmare.

"I never imagined," replied her companion in a vague uncertain tone of
voice, like one laboring under the influence of a narcotic, "that such
people existed anywhere outside of books, and yet the samples to which
we have just been introduced make characters of fiction look tame in
comparison. Oh, dear!" she burst forth, "who could have imagined it?"

"What a transition--I can't understand it!" said Bessie. "I feel like
one who has just dropped from the sky to earth."

"No wonder! I, too, am still seeing stars. Jack certainly must be mad,
else how could he have ever picked out such a forsaken land whose
inhabitants seem to consist chiefly of ruffians and black women?"

"It's simply incomprehensible after all he's seen of the world," replied
Bessie. "Did you notice how he enjoyed our discomfiture? How it was all
he could do to keep from laughing in our faces?"

"The brute!" cried Blanch.

"If we had only realized to what we were coming--" Bessie began.

"Oh, it's too late to say that!" interrupted Blanch. "Now that I'm here,
I'm not going to turn back; I'm going to see this thing through. And
what's more," she added with unmistakable emphasis, "I'm going to see
that woman! Have you noticed any one that looks like her?" she asked
cautiously, lowering her voice and looking about suspiciously, as she
rose from her seat.

"Ps