She broke off suddenly, as if she feared she had said too much.  “Judy,” she demanded, “is Mis’ Dax busy with Leander now?”

“Not more than usual,” smiled Judith.

“Jest tell her for me, will you, that I want to hire her husband to do some herdin’; Leander’s handy, ‘n’ can work good an’ sharp, if he is an infidel.  An’ I like to have him over now an’ then, as you know, Judy.  As the Book of Hiram says, ’It’s neighborly to ease the check-rein of a gentled husband.’  But you tell him I don’t want to hear any of his ever-lastin’ fool argufyin’ ’bout religion.  Leander ’d stop in the middle of shearin’ a sheep to argue that Jonah never came out o’ the whale’s belly.  I ain’t no use for infidels, ’less they’re muzzled, which Leander mos’ generally is.”

With the feeling that there was an excellent though unspoken understanding between them, the two girls walked together to the top of the path that wandered away from camp towards a bluff overlooking wave after wave of foot-hills, lying blue and still like a petrified sea.

“I’m still dying to know who wrote that letter,” begged Mary.

“It was written by a lady who is very anxious to return to Washington, and she took that means of getting one more vote.  Her husband is going to run for the Senate next term.  We hear a good deal of that side of politics, you know.”

“It was certainly convincing,” remarked the victim of the letter.  “My aunts detected many virtues in the handwriting.”

“But now that you are really here, isn’t it splendid?  Mountains are such good neighbors.  They give you their great company and yet leave you your own little reservations.”

“But I fear I can never feel at home out-of-doors,” Mary announced, with such a rueful expression that they both smiled.

“Perhaps, then, it depends on the frame of mind.  I’ve had longer than you to cultivate it.”

Mary looked towards the mountains, serene in their strength.  “Awesome as they are,” she laughed, “they don’t frighten me nearly as much as Ben and Ned.  They are really very difficile, my pupils, and I feel so ridiculous sitting up back of that tub, teaching them letters and the spelling of foolish words, when they know things I’ve never dreamed of.  The other day, out of a few scratches in the dust that I should never have given a second glance, one of them made out that some one’s horses had broken the corral and one was trailing a rope.  Whereupon my pupil got on a horse, went in search of the strays, and returned them to men going to a round-up.  After that, the spelling of cat didn’t seem quite so much of an achievement as it had before.”

“But they need the spelling of cat so much more than you need to understand trail-marks.  Why don’t you try a little strategy with them?  Perhaps a bribe, even?  It seems to me I remember something in history about the part played in colonization by the bright-colored bead.”