“If you are tired, an’ want to go to bed, you can shuck off and lie down any time.  Ben, Jack, Ned, go an’ set with paw in the tent while the gov’ment gets ready for bed.  Cacta and Clem, you help me with them quilts.”

Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked her, with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as to the location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep “light or dark.”  She chose “dark” at random, hating to display her ignorance of the alternatives, with the happy result that her bed was made up to leeward of the great sheep-wagon, in a nice little corner of the State of Wyoming.  Mary was grateful that she had chosen dark.

As she dozed off, she was reminded of a certain magazine illustration that Archie had pinned over his bed after the aunts had given a grudging consent to this westward journey.  There was a line beneath the pictorial decoy which read:  “Ranch Life in the New West.”  And there were piazzas with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a tea-table with a samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring tea.  The stern reality apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains, with houses of the packing-box school of architecture at a distance of seventy or eighty miles apart.  No ladies in white muslin poured tea; they garbed themselves in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had an acrid, personal note.  But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that picture, and that he thought of her in such ideal surroundings.

X

On Horse-thief Trail

Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day meal to go in quest of her brother.  He had left his comfortable cabin on the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the “bad man’s country,” one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyoming and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice.  Judith took the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, the day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never a glance backward.  Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that day from her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in the direction he had taken.  But her thoughts were weary of journeying over that trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she had travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of the yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he rode exultant to Kitty, to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood should prompt.  But Judith was more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joy and pain.  For she knew—­such skill has love in inference from detail—­that the mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could have whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better than she did Peter or Peter’s happiness, and that she would not marry him except as a makeshift.  For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had a white-and-gold volume of them that Judith fancied he said his prayers to.