nd Red
Drake's wife, and old man Edgar's daughter, for they were magpies who
chattered continually and maliciously, hating Miss Woppit because she
wisely chose to have nothing to do with them. She lived with her brother
Jim on the side-hill, just off the main road, in the cabin that Smooth
Ephe Hicks built before he was thrown off his broncho into the gulch. It
was a pretty but lonesome place, about three-quarters of a mile from the
camp, adjoining the claim which Jim Woppit worked in a lazy sort of
way--Jim being fairly well fixed, having sold off a coal farm in Illinois
just before he came west.

In this little cabin abode Miss Woppit during the period of her wooing, a
period covering, as I now recall, six or, may be, eight months. She was
so pretty, so modest, so diligent, so homekeeping, and so shy, what
wonder that those lonely, heart-hungry men should fall in love with her?
In all the population of the camp the number of women was fewer than two
score, and of this number half were married, others were hopeless
spinsters, and others were irretrievably bad, only excepting Miss Woppit,
the prettiest, the tidiest, the gentlest of all. She was good, pure, and
lovely in her womanliness; I shall not say that I envied--no, I respected
Hoover and Dodsley and Barber Sam for being stuck on the girl; you 'd
have respected 'em, too, if you 'd seen her and--and _them_. But I _did_
take it to heart because Miss Woppit seemed disinclined to favor any suit
for her fair hand--particularly because she was by no means partial to
Three-fingered Hoover, as square a man as ever struck pay dirt--dear old
pardner, your honest eyes will never read these lines, between which
speaks my lasting love for you!

In the first place, Miss Woppit would never let the boys call on her of
an evening unless her brother Jim was home; she had strict notions about
that sort of thing which she would n't waive. I reckon she was right
according to the way society looks at these things, but it was powerful
hard on Three-fingered Hoover and Jake Dodsley and Barber Sam to be
handicapped by etiquette when they had their bosoms chock full of love
and were dying to tell the girl all about it.

Jake Dodsley came a heap nearer than the others to letting Miss Woppit
know what his exact feelings were. He was a poet of no mean order. What
he wrote was printed regularly in Cad Davis' Leadville paper under the
head of "Pearls of Pegasus," and all us Red Hoss Mo