What was it?  Eleanor took a second look at the two women, and recognized both, the Sheriff’s wife and the English lady.  They were arrayed gorgeously, her neighbor across in lavender silk, her elbow traveller in black with a profusion of cheap lace round the ash colored V of exposed skin:  Eleanor wished the woman had powdered all the way down.  She, herself, had come garbed for the dust of stage travel, a broad brimmed English sailor and a kakhi duster motoring coat.  Was it because she was not garbed as the others that they rebuffed her friendly overtures, she wondered.  At the next stop, she passed out to go up and ride on the driver’s seat, manifestly an impossible feat for ladies in lavender and undertaker’s plumes.  A fat hand reached forward to shove the door open.  It was Bat Brydges’.  She nodded her thanks, and the handy man bowed with a sweep of his hat naming her aloud for the whole stage to hear.  If a look could have blasted Mr. Bat Brydges, he would have been dissolved in gaseous matter from the expression that passed over the face under the sailor hat.  She heard the hilarity break bounds inside as she mounted the driver’s seat; and felt very much as you have felt when you have come out of the clatter of the orchestra pit where you have chanced to sit next to a musk-scented neighbor.

But she forgot the lavender grandee and the gold teeth and the undertaker’s plumes, as she sat on the upper seat with the one-armed driver behind the double tandem grays.  The sun was coming up over the Rim Rocks in a half fan of fire; and the light was on the Ridge; and all the silver cataracts tossing down the sheer wall shone wind-blown spray against the evergreens.  The Valley widened as it dropped to the leap and fume and swirl of the foaming river; and the double tandem grays kept step with a proud chacking up of heads and bristling of arched necks and movement of thigh and shoulder muscles under satin skin like shuttles.

“You must be very proud of your beautiful horses,” she said to the driver.

The driver ’lowed he was:  that ’un dappled on the rump there, that ’un was foaled, let me see? year o’ the rush to the Black Hills, with a squirt of chewing tobacco over the front wheel and a damn’t, and another squirt and more damn’t’s; and before Eleanor realized the one-armed driver had asked her if she wouldn’t like to learn to drive double tandems; and she had the reins in her hands; and the double tandem grays took the bit in their teeth to show what double tandem grays and ample oats could do.

“How-do,” called the driver with a squirt of tobacco over the front wheel at a rancher loping across the trail.  “How-do; y’ are up early, y’ son of a gun!  What d’ y’ know?”

“Senator’s goin’ t’ stand again this fall,” called the man.

The driver emitted another damn’t in true Western style just as innocently as an Easterner says “Oh, yes, indeed,” or an Englishman says “My word.”  In fact Eleanor lost count of the damn’t’s.