it was the day she begun
about our drinking water. She wanted to know what the analysis showed
it to contain. She was scared out of her pleasant smile for a minute when
she found I'd never had the water analyzed. I thought, first, the poor
thing had been reading these beer advertisements; you know--the kind they
print asking if you are certain about the purity of your drinking water,
telling of the fatal germs that will probably be swimming there, and
intimating that probably the only dead-safe bet when you are thirsty
is a pint of their pure, wholesome beer, which never yet gave typhoid
fever to any one. But, no; Julia just thought all water ought to be
analyzed on general principles, and wouldn't I have a sample of ours
sent off at once? She'd filled a bottle with some and suggested it with
her pleasantest platform smile.

"'Yes,' I says; 'and suppose the report comes back that this water is
fatal to man and beast? And it's the only water round here. What then?
I'd be in a hell of a fix--wouldn't I?'

"I don't deny I used to fall back on words now and then when her smile
got to me. And we went right on using water that might or might not make
spicy reading in a chemist's report; I only been here thirty years and
it's too soon to tell. Anyway, it was then I see she was gifted with a
prowling mind, which is all I can think of to call it. It went with her
accusing face. She didn't think anything in this world was as near right
as it could be made by some good woman.

"Of course she had other things besides the water to worry about. She
was a writer, too. She would write about how friction in the home life
may be avoided by one of the parties giving in to the other and letting
the wife say how the money shall be spent, and pieces about what the
young girl should do next, and what the young wife should do if
necessary, and so on. For some reason she was paid money for these
pieces.

"However, she was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which
was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything
on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you
might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here
community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we
stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving,
his wife worked to the bone, and Dave doing nothing but play on a cheap
fiddle! How did they get their bread from day to