"Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer resort;
think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and travelling
out over this great lonesome desert."

Chugg's mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in silence
with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered to himself
rather than to the fat lady, "Nowhere's safe from 'em; women and
house-flies is universally prevailing."

The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. "He's no
gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it."

All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a
molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the grasshoppers kept up their
shrill chirping--and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a
tangible thing.

Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered, and
as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the
endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them up
and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities, and
sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:

"'Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.'
The words came low and mournfully
From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay
On his dying couch at the close of day."

The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was driving
ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweetwater, who began, in the
maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings, and who steadily
grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he reached the altitude of
six feet four, growing hourly in height and fierceness.

But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the "Ballad of the Mule-Skinner,"
with what seemed to both terrified passengers an awful warning of their
overthrow:

"As I was going down the road,
With a tired team and a heavy load,
I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung--
The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung,
The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue--"

This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at intervals
during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to escape
without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed lives.

At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing Leander's
compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the place was
certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make acquaintances
throu