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 space. From horizon to
horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped
earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always
the same—the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident
progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.

It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of
things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads,
wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily