“Was you expectin’ any of your lady friends by Chugg’s stage that you are so frettin’ anxious?” she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed miserably.

“You’ve heard about Chugg’s goin’ on since ‘Mountain Pink’ jilted him?” inquired Mrs. Dax of the fat lady, as the only one of the party who might have kept abreast with the social chronicles of the neighborhood.

“My land, yes,” responded the fat lady, proud to be regarded as socially cognizant.  “M’ son says he’s plumb locoed about it—­didn’t want me to travel by his stage.  But I said he dassent upset a woman of my age—­he just nacherally dassent!”

Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story which was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them on their journey.

It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road.  His luck in these encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, “while he had been shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the old man yet.”

Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the manner of these frontiersmen.  Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance of the “before treatment” view of a chiropodist’s sign.  This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s earliest manhood.  It had been his only love—­till he met Mountain Pink.

Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s stage-route.  She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water.  Furthermore, she could “bring about a dried-apple pie” to make a man forget the cooking of his mother.  Great was the havoc wrought by Mountain Pink’s pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous precedent of Caesar’s wife, and, like her pastry, remained above suspicion.

Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled jury that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to his own advantages.  Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her beauty, but there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one of her pies.  When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of liquid refreshment that makes these little personalities not impossible, Bosky had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among shoe-makers’ children.