Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook and eyeless freedom of attire which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly.  One sleeve cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the blue veins of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends.  Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious.

“I reckon we kin put the new preacher in Kernel Starbottle’s room,” said Miss Morvin, the housekeeper.  “The kernel’s going to-night.”

“Oh,” said the widow in a tone of relief, but whether at the early departure of the gallant colonel or at the successful solution of the problem of lodging the preacher, Miss Morvin could not determine.  But she went on tentatively:—­

“The kernel was talkin’ in the bar room, and kind o’ wonderin’ why you hadn’t got married agin.  Said you’d make a stir in Sacramento—­but you was jest berried here.”

“I suppose he’s heard of my husband?” said the widow indifferently.

“Yes—­but he said he couldn’t place you,” returned Miss Morvin.

The widow looked up.  “Couldn’t place me?” she repeated.

“Yes—­hadn’t heard o’ MacGlowrie’s wife and disremembered your brothers.”

“The colonel doesn’t know everybody, even if he is a fighting man,” said Mrs. MacGlowrie with languid scorn.

“That’s just what Dick Blair said,” returned Miss Morvin.  “And though he’s only a doctor, he jest stuck up agin’ the kernel, and told that story about your jabbin’ that man with your scissors—­beautiful; and how you once fought off a bear with a red-hot iron, so that you’d have admired to hear him.  He’s awfully gone on you!”

The widow took that opportunity to button her cuff.

“And how long does the preacher calculate to stay?” she added, returning to business details.

“Only a day.  They’ll have his house fixed up and ready for him to-morrow.  They’re spendin’ a heap o’ money on it.  He ought to be the pow’ful preacher they say he is—­to be worth it.”

But here Mrs. MacGlowrie’s interest in the conversation ceased, and it dropped.

In her anxiety to further the suit of Dick Blair, Miss Morvin had scarcely reported the colonel with fairness.

That gentleman, leaning against the bar in the hotel saloon with a cocktail in his hand, had expatiated with his usual gallantry upon Mrs. MacGlowrie’s charms, and on his own “personal” responsibility had expressed the opinion that they were thrown away on Laurel Spring.  That—­blank it all—­she reminded him of the blankest beautiful woman he had seen even in Washington—­old Major Beveridge’s daughter from Kentucky.  Were they sure she wasn’t from Kentucky?  Wasn’t her name Beveridge—­and not Boompointer?  Becoming more reminiscent over