the meat from his bones at leisure. Of course that ain't the way ladies
was spoken of in the Aunt Patty Little Helper Series I got out of the
Presbyterian Sabbath-school library back in Fredonia, New York, when I
was thirteen--and yet--and yet--as they say on the stage in these plays
of high or English life."

It sounded promising enough, and the dust had now settled so that I
could dimly make out the noble lines of my hostess. I begged for more.

"Well, go on--Mrs. Burchell Daggett once nearly forgot her womanhood.
Certainly, go on, if it's anything that would be told outside of a
smoking-car."

The lady grinned.

"Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she
confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that
album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up
once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!"
She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately
constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its
pedestal. "Get me there, do you?"

It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding
skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held
a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive
disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late
Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.

"Very well--now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month."
It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In
wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she
bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.

"Yes, sir, I hadn't been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood
like that. Gee! How good it felt to get into 'em and banish that
sideshow tent of a skirt. I'd never known a free moment before and I
blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it. Then, proud as Punch,
what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt
Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free
life I was now leading in the Far West. And what do I get for it but a
tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor,
the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of
Sister Baxter's appeal to me--asking why do I parade myself shamelessly
in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to
the true nobility that must s