“’No one to love,
    None to caress.’

“Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don’t bear none of the brands of this yere range.  She lives back East, and him and her took up their claims in each other’s affections through a matrimonial paper known as The Heart and Hand.  So they takes their pens in hand and gets through a hard spell of courtin’ on paper.  Love plumb locoes Johnnie.  His spellin’ don’t suit him, his handwritin’ don’t suit him, his natchral letters don’t suit him.  So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin’ books he can buy—­Handbook of Correspondence, The Epistolary Guide, The Ready Letter-Writer, and a stack more.  There’s no denyin’ it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters.”

“Land’s sakes!” said the fat lady.

“Yes, marm; he used to read ’em to me, beginnin’ how he had just seized five minutes to write to her, when he’d worked the whole day like a mule over it.  She seemed to like the brand, an’ when he sent her the money to come out here an’ get married, she come as straight as if she had been mailed with a postage-stamp.”

“The brazen thing!” said the fat lady.

“They stopped here, goin’ home to their place.  My Lord! warn’t she a high-flyer!  She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail—­my wife called it a Sikey knot—­and it stood out a foot from her head.  Some of the boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it wouldn’t hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin’s of the groom.

“From the start,” continued Leander, “the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered to get at each other; an’ while I, as a slave to the fair sex”—­here he bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael—­“hesitates to use such langwidge in their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin shorely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin’ to chaw each other.

“At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an’ foot, and she just read novels and played stylish all the time and danced.  She was the hardest dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any old war-dancin’ chief up to the reservation.  No dance she ever heard of was too far for her to go to.  She just went and danced till broad daylight.  Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his circumstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly.  Why, he’d leave his dishes go from one day till the next—­”

“There’s more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if they wasn’t looked after.”  And the wife of his bosom stood in the door like a vengeful household goddess.  Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest plates.

IV

Judith, The Postmistress

The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from “Town,” but Chugg was late—­a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing.  In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.