“Prison reform, for instance.  That was the first topic on which she delivered addresses to me.  I couldn’t make much out of it, except that we don’t rely enough on our convicts’ rugged honour.  It was only a side line with her; still, she didn’t slight it.  She could talk at length about the innate sterling goodness of the misunderstood burglar.  I got tired of it.  I told her one day that, if you come right down to it, I’d bet the men inside penitentiaries didn’t average up one bit higher morally than the men outside.  She said, with her pleasantest smile, that I didn’t understand; so I never tried to after that.

“The lady had a prowling mind.  Mebbe that ain’t the right word, but it come to me soon after she got here.  I think it was the day she begun about our drinking water.  She wanted to know what the analysis showed it to contain.  She was scared out of her pleasant smile for a minute when she found I’d never had the water analyzed.  I thought, first, the poor thing had been reading these beer advertisements; you know—­the kind they print asking if you are certain about the purity of your drinking water, telling of the fatal germs that will probably be swimming there, and intimating that probably the only dead-safe bet when you are thirsty is a pint of their pure, wholesome beer, which never yet gave typhoid fever to any one.  But, no; Julia just thought all water ought to be analyzed on general principles, and wouldn’t I have a sample of ours sent off at once?  She’d filled a bottle with some and suggested it with her pleasantest platform smile.

“‘Yes,’ I says; ’and suppose the report comes back that this water is fatal to man and beast?  And it’s the only water round here.  What then?  I’d be in a hell of a fix—­wouldn’t I?’

“I don’t deny I used to fall back on words now and then when her smile got to me.  And we went right on using water that might or might not make spicy reading in a chemist’s report; I only been here thirty years and it’s too soon to tell.  Anyway, it was then I see she was gifted with a prowling mind, which is all I can think of to call it.  It went with her accusing face.  She didn’t think anything in this world was as near right as it could be made by some good woman.

“Of course she had other things besides the water to worry about.  She was a writer, too.  She would write about how friction in the home life may be avoided by one of the parties giving in to the other and letting the wife say how the money shall be spent, and pieces about what the young girl should do next, and what the young wife should do if necessary, and so on.  For some reason she was paid money for these pieces.

“However, she was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for.  And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say.  She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn’t do something about Dave Pickens.  That’s the place we stopped this morning.  She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked to the bone, and Dave doing nothing but play on a cheap fiddle!  How did they get their bread from day to day?