is Highland fling,
"by request." She remembered their merrymaking with Simpson at breakfast.
What did they intend to do with her belongings? And as she remembered the
little plaid sewing-bag that Aunt Adelaide had made for
her--surreptitiously drying her tears in the mean time--when she remembered
that bag and the possibility of its being submitted to ignominy, she could
have cried or done murder, she wasn't sure which.

"Well, 'pon my wohd, heah ah the boys with yo' baggage. How time du fly!"

"Oh!" she gasped, "what are they going to do with it?"

"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 spa