Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

“God A’mighty!” she said, “he’s lost his false teeth!” And without another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation.  Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett’s remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone conversation: 

“What did you have ’em out for?...  You didn’t have ’em out?...  I just shook ’em out?  Then what made you have your mouth open?  Ef your mouth had been shut, you couldn’t have lost ’em....  You was a-yawnin’, eh?  Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o’ china teeth.  Your yawnin’ ‘ll put us back a good hour an’ we won’t reach camp before sundown.”

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to search along the road.  He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by this landmark.  Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get down “and help to prospect for them teeth.”  As Mary clambered down she heard a fragment of the matriarch’s monologue, which, being duly expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

“Talk about a woman bein’ at the bottom of everything!” sniffed Mrs. Yellett; “I be so sick of always hearin’ about ‘the woman in the case!’ Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left exclusive to the men.  The Book of Hiram says:  ’A skunk may have his good p’ints, but few folks is takin’ the risk of waitin’ round to get acquainted with ’em.’”

While Mary was still “prospecting,” a glad cry roused her attention, and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

“Quit smilin’ like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!” called out Mrs. Yellett.  “Do you want to lose ’em again?”

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon.  The heat, which had been oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow.  The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as if they had scent of something menacing.  Across the horizon a dark cloud scudded, no bigger than your hand.