Fortunate, indeed, they considered themselves when they saw how matters stood in Comanche. There seemed to be two men for every cot in the place. Of women there were few, and June's mother shuddered when she thought of what they would have been obliged to face if they hadn't been so lucky as to get a tent to themselves. "I never would have got off that train!" she declared. "No, I never would have brought my daughter into any such unprotected place as this!" Mrs. Reed looked around her severely, for life was starting to lift its head again in Comanche after the oppression of the afternoon's heat. Mrs. Mann smiled. She was beginning to take a comprehensive account of the distance between Wyoming and the town near Boston where the miller toiled in the gloom of his mill. "I think it's perfectly lovely and romantic!" said she. Mrs. Reed received the outburst with disfavor. "Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!" warned she. Dorothy Ann sighed, gently caressing the black bag which dangled upon her slender arm. "I do, Malvina," said she. CHAPTER III UNCONVENTIONAL BEHAVIOR Their situation was somewhat beyond the seat of noisy business and raucous-throated pleasure. Mrs. Reed, while living in an unending state of shivers on account of the imagined perils which stalked the footsteps of June, was a bit assured by their surroundings. In front of them was a vacant plot, in which inoffensive horses took their siesta in the sun, awaiting someone to come along and hire them for rides of inspection over the lands which were soon to be apportioned by lot. A trifle farther along stood a little church, its unglazed windows black and hollow, like gouged-out eyes. Mrs. Reed drew a vast amount of comfort from the church, and their proximity to it, knowing nothing of its history nor its present uses. Its presence there was proof to her that all Comanche was not a waste of iniquity. Almost directly in front of their tent the road branched--one prong running to Meander, the county Seat, sixty miles away; the other to the Big Horn Valley. The scarred stagecoaches which had come down from the seventies were still in use on both routes, the two on the Meander line being reenforced by democrat wagons when there was an overflow of business, as frequently happened in those prosperous times. Every morning the company assembled before the tent under the canvas spread to protect the cookstove, to watch Mrs. Reed and Sergeant Schaefer get breakfast, and to offer suggestions about the fire, and admire June at her toast-making--the one branch of domestic art, aside from fudge, which she had mastered. About that time the stage would pass, setting out on its dusty run to Meander, and everybody on it and in it would wave, everybody in the genial company before the tent would wave back, and all of the adventurers on both sides would feel quite primitive, in spite of the snuffling of the locomotive at the railway station, pushing around freight-cars.