“But then, she’s a sentimental old mush-head, anyhow.  Guess what she told me out in the kitchen!  She’s been reading what the Germans did to women and children in Belgium, and she says:  ’Of course I hate Germans; and yet it don’t seem as if I could ever hate ’em enough to want to kill a lot of German babies!’ Wasn’t that the confession of a weakling?  I guess that’s all you’d want to know about that woman.  My sakes!  Will you look at that mess of clouds?  I bet it’s falling weather over in Surprise Valley.  A good moisting wouldn’t hurt us any either.”

That seemed to be about all.  Yet I was loath to leave the topic.  I still had a warm glow in my heart for the aged couple, and I could hear Uncle Henry’s bottle of adolescent peach brandy laughing to itself from where it was lashed to the back of my saddle.  I struck in the only weak spot in the wall.

“You say they were persuaded into this marriage.  Well, who persuaded them?  Isn’t there something interesting about that?”

It had, indeed, been a shrewd stroke.  Ma Pettengill’s eyes lighted.

“Say, didn’t I ever tell you about Mrs. Julia Wood Atkins, the well-known lady reformer?”

“You did not.  We have eight miles yet.”

“Oh, very well!”

So for eight miles of a road that led between green fields on our right and a rolling expanse of sagebrush on our left, I heard something like this: 

“Well, this prominent club lady had been out on the Coast for some time heading movements and telling people how to do things, and she had got run down.  She’s a friend of Mrs. W.B.  Hemingway, the well-known social leader and club president of Yonkers, who is an old friend of mine; and Mrs. W.B. writes that dear Julia is giving her life to the cause—­I forget what cause it was right then—­and how would it be for me to have her up here on the ranch for a vacation, where she could recover her spirits and be once more fitted to enter the arena.  I say I’m only too glad to oblige, and the lady comes along.

“She seemed right human at first—­kind of haggard and overtrained, but with plenty of fights left in her; a lady from forty-eight to fifty-four, with a fine hearty manner that must go well on a platform, and a kind of accusing face.  That’s the only word I can think of for it.  She’d be pretty busy a good part of the day with pamphlets and papers that she or someone else had wrote, but I finally managed to get her out on a gentle old horse—­that one you’re riding—­so she could liven up some; and we got along quite well together.

“The only thing that kind of went against me was, she’s one of them that thinks a kind word and a pleasant smile will get ’em anywhere, and she worked both on me a little too much like it was something professional.

“Still, I put it by and listened to her tell about the awful state the world is in, and how a few earnest women could set it right in a week if it wasn’t for the police.