mother.
Consequently, it made no sense whatever. Its effect was the usual effect
of remarks designed to break a thing gently. It merely made Mrs. Wood's
head swim, and filled her with a sickening dread. "Oh, mercy, Sarah,"
she had cried, "come here. What does this mean?" And then, fortified by
her elder daughter, she had turned over that first page and found what
it meant on the top of the second. "A savage with knives and pistols!"
she wailed.

"Well, mother, I always told you so," said her daughter Sarah.

"What is a foreman?" exclaimed the mother. "And who is Judge Henry?"

"She has taken a sort of upper servant," said Sarah. "If it is allowed
to go as far as a wedding, I doubt if I can bring myself to be present."
(This threat she proceeded to make to Molly, with results that shall be
set forth in their proper place.)

"The man appears to have written to me himself," said Mrs. Wood.

"He knows no better," said Sarah.

"Bosh!" said Sarah's husband later. "It was a very manly thing to do."
Thus did consternation rage in the house at Bennington. Molly might
have spared herself the many assurances that she gave concerning
the universal esteem in which her cow-puncher was held, and the fair
prospects which were his. So, in the first throes of her despair, Mrs.
Wood wrote those eight not maturely considered pages to the great-aunt.

"Tut, tut, tut!" said the great-aunt as she read them. Her face was much
more severe to-day. "You'd suppose," she said, "that the girl had been
kidnapped! Why, she has kept him waiting three years!" And then she
read more, but soon put the letter down with laughter. For Mrs. Wood
had repeated in writing that early outburst of hers about a savage with
knives and pistols. "Law!" said the great-aunt. "Law, what a fool Lizzie
is!"

So she sat down and wrote to Mrs. Wood a wholesome reply about putting
a little more trust in her own flesh and blood, and reminding her among
other things that General Stark had himself been wont to carry knives
and pistols owing to the necessities of his career, but that he had
occasionally taken them off, as did probably this young man in Wyoming.
"You had better send me the letter he has written you," she concluded.
"I shall know much better what to think after I have seen that."

It is not probable that Mrs. Wood got much comfort from this
communication; and her daughter Sarah was actually enraged by it.
"She grows more perverse as she nears her dotage,"