Mrs. Balaam had told them
of her disappointment that she would be absent from the ranch on Butte
Creek when her friend arrived, and therefore unable to entertain her.
The friend's decision had been quite suddenly made, and must form the
subject of the next chapter.

VIII. THE SINCERE SPINSTER

I do not know with which of the two estimates--Mr. Taylor's or the
Virginian's--you agreed. Did you think that Miss Mary Stark Wood of
Bennington, Vermont, was forty years of age? That would have been an
error. At the time she wrote the letter to Mrs. Balaam, of which
letter certain portions have been quoted in these pages, she was in
her twenty-first year; or, to be more precise, she had been twenty some
eight months previous.

Now, it is not usual for young ladies of twenty to contemplate a journey
of nearly two thousand miles to a country where Indians and wild animals
live unchained, unless they are to make such journey in company with a
protector, or are going to a protector's arms at the other end. Nor is
school teaching on Bear Creek a usual ambition for such young ladies.

But Miss Mary Stark Wood was not a usual young lady for two reasons.

First, there was her descent. Had she so wished, she could have belonged
to any number of those patriotic societies of which our American ears
have grown accustomed to hear so much. She could have been enrolled in
the Boston Tea Party, the Ethan Allen Ticonderogas, the Green Mountain
Daughters, the Saratoga Sacred Circle, and the Confederated Colonial
Chatelaines. She traced direct descent from the historic lady whose name
she bore, that Molly Stark who was not a widow after the battle where
her lord, her Captain John, battled so bravely as to send his name
thrilling down through the blood of generations of schoolboys. This
ancestress was her chief claim to be a member of those shining societies
which I have enumerated. But she had been willing to join none of them,
although invitations to do so were by no means lacking. I cannot tell
you her reason. Still, I can tell you this. When these societies were
much spoken of in her presence, her very sprightly countenance became
more sprightly, and she added her words of praise or respect to the
general chorus. But when she received an invitation to join one of
these bodies, her countenance, as she read the missive, would assume an
expression which was known to her friends as "sticking her nose in the
air." I do not think that Mo