way as regularly as the ticking of
a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would
yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made
Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of
dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks
heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture
brought before her one of Vedder's pictures that hung in the shabby old
library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage. She
knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left
the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over
the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could not be certain
that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and
desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything.
Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage,
eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only sit huddled into a
heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an
automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the "lightning" when it
was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that
separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her
comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than
monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage
creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless
journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those
maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are
given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: "All the world's--a
stage--creak--screech--all--the world's a stage--creak--screech!" over and over
till Mary found herself fast succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the
constant repetition, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness
of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, "This
here stage gets to naggin' me along about here. She's hungry for her
axle-grease--that's what ails her."

"I suppose," Mary roused herself to say, "you have quite a feeling of
comradeship for the stage."

"Me and Clara"--the stage had this name painted on the side--"have been
travelling together nigh onto four year. And while ther