ing barely to the knees, contributed to the originality
of her dress.

The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert
dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became
conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her
back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight
carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the
wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril of
life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels,
gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some two
hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to a
wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the
vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his
frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but
her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four
horses' hoofs, and the continual "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" of the
driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the road
in indescribably pathetic pantomime. "Perhaps the poor creature wants to
turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn't one,"
thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the most
inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress.
Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane
things what was the matter with her companions.

Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a
better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

"God A'mighty!" she said, "he's lost his false teeth!" And without another
word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell
little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far
back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of
the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, as
Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett's remarks only, she received
something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone
conversation:

"What did you have 'em out for?... You didn't have 'em out?... I just
shook 'em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth had
been shut, you couldn't have lost 'em.... You was a-yawnin', eh? Well, you
are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of