In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate condition of Mr. Chugg—­would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for his job?  Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel.  Not so the fat lady.  Falling into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on Sweetwater.  Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in her family for the past thirty-five years.  Miss Carmichael felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who “died of a Friday along of eating clams.”  He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany.  But loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg’s condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, “Before I’d trust my precious neck to him, I’d get Mr. Dax to shoot me.”

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy.  But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax’s husband.  Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom.  Otherwise he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he of repressing himself in the marital presence that Leander passed for middle height.  He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness of a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of human servility.  But no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began quite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual, coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat.  Mary and the fat lady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures equally frank, and Leander ventured finally