At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties.  The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of builder or carpenter.  The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert.  Springing from the main building, like claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms minus either side walls or flooring.  Indeed, they might easily have passed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and supper in the course of preparation.  Seen from any vantage-point in the surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the stage—­the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being realistically depicted.  The dramatis persona who occupied the centre of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a rocking-chair.  She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture of her skin in merciless contrast.  Perhaps because she still harbored illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns, snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the protection of four walls.  From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her attire—­the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid aside at night.  Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney’s step-mother, nee Tumlin—­she who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.

Mrs. Rodney’s interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours away.  The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her.  Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said:  “Howdy?  Ye be Miz Yellett’s gov’ment, ain’t ye?” There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.

“Government?” repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the noise and motion of the stage; “I’m afraid I hardly understand.”