The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident
with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from "Town,"
but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe
waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that
woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the
sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and
the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and
incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.

Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the
travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator,
with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed
marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late breakfast-table, swept
and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office,
prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the
social centre of the surrounding country.

Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped again
over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without
end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small
that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a
horseman.

There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was
ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting,
Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly
and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary figure to signify
the infinitude of space in the background. In all that great, wide world
the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the
rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The rider, now close enough for Miss