“Place it on the stage, awaitin’ yo’ ohdahs.” And to her expression of infinite relief—“Yo’ didn’t think any disrepec’ would be shown the baggage of a lady honorin’ this hyeh metropolis with her presence?” She thanked the knights of the lariat the more warmly for her unjust suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses’ heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to civilization was cut. III. Leander And His Lady The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon—pasteboard boxes of sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to dispose of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry almost automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the supplies lasted. Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and those who keep their mouths open. From time to time the stage-driver invoked his team in cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled forward with fresh energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean of space, their driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who crack a whip and play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the mountains still mocked in the distance. A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile. The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly over the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space. From horizon to horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always the same—the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence. It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads, wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This wilderness was so gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscape at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from a Japanese garden in its delicate artificiality.