then writhing in the coils of perverse
romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose
talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy
necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these
encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to
Chugg's ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, "while he had been
shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the
old man yet."

Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the
manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart,
and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so
full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance
of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist's sign. This darling of
his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg's earliest manhood. It had
been his only love--till he met Mountain Pink.

Mountain Pink's husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg's
stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had
not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water.
Furthermore, she could "bring about a dried-apple pie" to make a man
forget the cooking of his mother. Great was the havoc wrought by Mountain
Pink's pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous precedent of
Caesar's wife, and, like her pastry, remained above suspicion.

Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled jury
that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to his own
advantages. Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her beauty, but
there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one of her pies.
When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of liquid
refreshment that makes these little personalities not impossible, Bosky
had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among shoe-makers' children.

Whatever were the facts of the case, Mountain Pink got the sympathy that
might have been expected in a section of the country where the ratio of
the sexes is fifty to one. Chugg, eating her pies regularly once a week on
his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with a red plush
photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this first reckless
expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona, Johnson, Converse, and
Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last found a vulnerable spot i