o her own bedroom, and indicating
an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a
more comfortable bed "in the East."

In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and
groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence,
the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to
pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss
Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel
Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was
sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate
condition of Mr. Chugg--would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for
his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss
Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her
solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling
into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place
of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on
Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in
her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an
especial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eating
clams." He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background
of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more
familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity,
apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce
vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael
remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg's
condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, "Before I'd trust my precious neck
to him, I'd get Mr. Dax to shoot me."

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware
for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But
so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely,
indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband.
Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts
for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy,
bald; if he ever stood straight e