Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur’s art—a world of desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes, served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and soda biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the woman who kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in Wonderland delusion. The fat lady had brought her own bedding—an apoplectic roll of bedquilts—and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protests of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against her accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by the controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of a traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she was young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicating an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a more comfortable bed “in the East.” In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons. Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate condition of Mr. Chugg—would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.