The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of a clock.  It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made Mary recall tales of banshees.  And once, when the first pale streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that hung in the shabby old library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage.  She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown.  She could not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything.  Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything.  She could only sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner.  He drove rigidly as an automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the “lightning” when it was bottled.  Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than monosyllables.  As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are given in seasons of nervous tension.  This time it was:  “All the world’s—­a stage—­creak—­screech—­all—­the world’s a stage—­creak—­screech!” over and over till Mary found herself fast succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the constant repetition, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, “This here stage gets to naggin’ me along about here.  She’s hungry for her axle-grease—­that’s what ails her.”

“I suppose,” Mary roused herself to say, “you have quite a feeling of comradeship for the stage.”

“Me and Clara”—­the stage had this name painted on the side—­“have been travelling together nigh onto four year.  And while there’s times that I would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent companions has their advantages.  Why, compare Clara to them female blizzards—­the two Mrs. Daxes—­and you see Clara’s good p’ints immejit.  Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys wouldn’t be glad to swap, but I’d have to be a heap more locoed than I am now to consent to the transaction.”