especial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eating
clams." He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background
of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more
familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity,
apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce
vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael
remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg’s
condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, "Before I’d trust my precious neck
to him, I’d get Mr. Dax to shoot me."

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware
for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But
so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely,
indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax’s husband.
Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts
for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy,
bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic
crooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he of
repressing himself in the marital presence that Leander passed for middle
height. He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness
of a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of human
servility. But no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began
quite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual,
coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat
lady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures
equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to
spend the night at his brother’s ranch, it being the next mess-box between
here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother’s ranch was their next