The fat lady had brought her own bedding—an apoplectic roll of
bedquilts—and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protests
of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against her
accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by the
controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of a
traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she was
young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicating
an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a
more comfortable bed "in the East."

In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and
groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence,
the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to
pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss
Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel
Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was
sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate
condition of Mr. Chugg—would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for
his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss
Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her
solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling
into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place
of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on
Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in
her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an