stood straight and alert in the manner of responsible
people. There was something wrong with her tail. It slanted far to
one side, one feather in it twice as long as the rest. Feathers on her
breast there were none. These had been worn entirely off by her habit of
sitting upon potatoes and other rough abnormal objects. And this lent
to her appearance an air of being decollete, singularly at variance
with her otherwise prudish ensemble. Her eye was remarkably bright, but
somehow it had an outraged expression. It was as if she went about the
world perpetually scandalized over the doings that fell beneath her
notice. Her legs were blue, long, and remarkably stout.

"She'd ought to wear knickerbockers," murmured the Virginian. "She'd
look a heap better 'n some o' them college students. And she'll set on
potatoes, yu' say?"

"She thinks she can hatch out anything. I've found her with onions, and
last Tuesday I caught her on two balls of soap."

In the afternoon the tall cow-puncher and I rode out to get an antelope.

After an hour, during which he was completely taciturn, he said: "I
reckon maybe this hyeh lonesome country ain't been healthy for Em'ly to
live in. It ain't for some humans. Them old trappers in the mountains
gets skewed in the haid mighty often, an' talks out loud when nobody's
nigher 'n a hundred miles."

"Em'ly has not been solitary," I replied. "There are forty chickens
here."

"That's so," said he. "It don't explain her."

He fell silent again, riding beside me, easy and indolent in the saddle.
His long figure looked so loose and inert that the swift, light spring
he made to the ground seemed an impossible feat. He had seen an antelope
where I saw none.

"Take a shot yourself," I urged him, as he motioned me to be quick. "You
never shoot when I'm with you."

"I ain't hyeh for that," he answered. "Now you've let him get away on
yu'!"

The antelope had in truth departed.

"Why," he said to my protest, "I can hit them things any day. What's
your notion as to Em'ly?"

"I can't account for her," I replied.

"Well," he said musingly, and then his mind took one of those particular
turns that made me love him, "Taylor ought to see her. She'd be just the
schoolmarm for Bear Creek!"

"She's not much like the eating-house lady at Medicine Bow," I said.

He gave a hilarious chuckle. "No, Em'ly knows nothing o' them joys. So
yu' have no notion about her? Well, I've got one. I reckon maybe she was
ha