a waggin, with your mouth full o'
china teeth. Your yawnin' 'll put us back a good hour an' we won't reach
camp before sundown."

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to
search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the
place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by
this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get
down "and help to prospect for them teeth." As Mary clambered down she
heard a fragment of the matriarch's monologue, which, being duly
expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take
ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the
way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man
had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

"Talk about a woman bein' at the bottom of everything!" sniffed Mrs.
Yellett; "I be so sick of always hearin' about 'the woman in the case!'
Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left
exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: 'A skunk may have his good
p'ints, but few folks is takin' the risk of waitin' round to get
acquainted with 'em.'"

While Mary was still "prospecting," a glad cry roused her attention, and
Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

"Quit smilin' like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!" called out Mrs.
Yellett. "Do you want to lose 'em again?"

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the
Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was
resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been
oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly
penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown
quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow.
The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as if
they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon a dark cloud
scudded, no bigger than your hand.

"Cloud-burst!" announced Mrs. Yellett.

"Cloud-burst, all right enough," agreed Leander, and he turned up his
coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.

There flashed into Mary Carmichael's mind a sentence from her physical
geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days:
"A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud had
been