“That’s the reason why I came,” she said, with a quiet smile.

She came up the next step and entered the room.  She was plainly but neatly dressed, and now that her figure was revealed he saw that she was wearing a linsey-woolsey riding-skirt, and carried a serviceable rawhide whip in her cotton-gauntleted hand.  She took the chair he offered her and sat down sideways on it, her whip hand now also holding up her skirt, and permitting a hem of clean white petticoat and a smart, well-shaped boot to be seen.

“I don’t remember to have had the pleasure of seeing you in Calaveras before,” said the editor tentatively.

“No.  I never was here before,” she said composedly, “but you’ve heard enough of me, I reckon.  I’m Mrs. Dimmidge.”  She threw one hand over the back of the chair, and with the other tapped her riding-whip on the floor.

The editor started.  Mrs. Dimmidge!  Then she was not a myth.  An absurd similarity between her attitude with the whip and her husband’s entrance with his gun six weeks before forced itself upon him and made her an invincible presence.

“Then you have returned to your husband?” he said hesitatingly.

“Not much!” she returned, with a slight curl of her lip.

“But you read his advertisement?”

“I saw that column of fool nonsense he put in your paper—­ef that’s what you mean,” she said with decision, “but I didn’t come here to see him—­but you.”

The editor looked at her with a forced smile, but a vague misgiving.  He was alone at night in a deserted part of the settlement, with a plump, self-possessed woman who had a contralto voice, a horsewhip, and—­he could not help feeling—­an evident grievance.

“To see me?” he repeated, with a faint attempt at gallantry.  “You are paying me a great compliment, but really”—­

“When I tell you I’ve come three thousand miles from Kansas straight here without stopping, ye kin reckon it’s so,” she replied firmly.

“Three thousand miles!” echoed the editor wonderingly.

“Yes.  Three thousand miles from my own folks’ home in Kansas, where six years ago I married Mr. Dimmidge,—­a British furriner as could scarcely make himself understood in any Christian language!  Well, he got round me and dad, allowin’ he was a reg’lar out-and-out profeshnal miner,—­had lived in mines ever since he was a boy; and so, not knowin’ what kind o’ mines, and dad just bilin’ over with the gold fever, we were married and kem across the plains to Californy.  He was a good enough man to look at, but it warn’t three months before I discovered that he allowed a wife was no better nor a nigger slave, and he the master.  That made me open my eyes; but then, as he didn’t drink, and didn’t gamble, and didn’t swear, and was a good provider and laid by money, why I shifted along with him as best I could.  We drifted down the first year to Sonora, at Red Dog, where there wasn’t another woman.