Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it as if she were cold.  The mercury must have stood close to a hundred, and she was hatless.  There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the morning.  Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with locked fingers behind her.  It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand belching furnaces.  A white, burning glare had spread itself from horizon to horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it.  From every corner of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like the last wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour.  This menacing orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of grasshoppers rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of the heat and glare; but it had a sound that boded evil.  Again and again she turned towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but there was never a glimpse of a horseman from that direction.

V

The Trail Of Sentiment

Within the house the travellers had disposed themselves in a repressed and melancholy circle that suggested the suspended animation of a funeral gathering.  The fat lady had turned back her skirt to save her travelling dress.  The stage was late, and there was no good and sufficient reason for wearing it out.  A similar consideration of economy led her to flirt off flies with her second best pocket-handkerchief.  Mrs. Dax presided over the gathering with awful severity.  Every one truckled to her shamefully, receiving her lightest remarks as if they were to be inscribed on tablets of bronze.  Leander, his eyes bright with excitement at being received in the family circle on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of his chair, anticipating dismissal.

“Chugg’s never ben so late as this,” said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself furiously.  She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending forth flame.  Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured assent and condemnation.

“And there ain’t a sign of him,” said Mrs. Dax, returning to the house after straining the landscape through her all-observant eye, and not detecting him in any of the remote pin-pricks on the horizon, in which these plainsfolk invariably decipher a herd of antelope, an elk or two, or a horseman.

“Bet he had a woman in the stage and upset it with her,” said Leander, in the animated manner of a poor relation currying favor with a bit of news.

Mrs. Dax regarded him severely for a moment, then conspicuously addressed her next remark to the ladies.  “Bet he had a woman in the stage, the old scoundrel!”

“Wonder who she was?” said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a poor relation whose surmise had been accepted.  But Mrs. Dax had evidently decided that Leander had gone far enough.