cognizant. "M’ son says he’s plumb locoed about it—didn’t want me to
travel by his stage. But I said he dassent upset a woman of my age—he just
nacherally dassent!"

Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story which
was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the
stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them on
their journey.

It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse
romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose
talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy
necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these
encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to
Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, "while he had been
shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the
old man yet."

Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the
manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart,
and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so
full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance
of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist’s sign. This darling of
his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s earliest manhood. It had
been his only love—till he met Mountain Pink.

Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s
stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had
not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water.
Furthermore, she could "bring about a dried-apple pie" to make a man