, and then she would launch a slap at him that
would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the
corpse with tranquil satisfaction--for she never missed her mosquito; she
was a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left
them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill
thirty or forty mosquitoes--watched her, and waited for her to say
something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation
myself. I said:

"The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam."

"You bet!"

"What did I understand you to say, madam?"

"You BET!"

Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:

"Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did,
b'gosh. Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust'n muskeeters and
wonderin' what was ailin' ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I
thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to
reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to
say. Wher'd ye come from?"

The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were
broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge
of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder
projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed
pronunciation!

How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till
I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.
She never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward
daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we
were nodding, by that time), and said:

"Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o'
days, and I'll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good
by edgin' in a word now and then, I'm right thar. Folks'll tell you't
I've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in
the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be,
if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my
equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all."

We resolved not to "lay by at Cottonwood."

CHAPTER III.

About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly
over the road--so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle,
lulling way, that wa