"Is that so?" said the fat lady, with a conspicuous lack of incredulity;
and she put her hand involuntarily to her frizzes.

This time she did not trust to the umbrella-handle as a medium of
communication between the stage-driver and herself. Putting her hand
through the port-hole she grasped Chugg’s arm—the bottle arm—with no
uncertain grip.

"Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer resort;
think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and travelling
out over this great lonesome desert."

Chugg’s mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in silence
with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered to himself
rather than to the fat lady, "Nowhere’s safe from ’em; women and
house-flies is universally prevailing."

The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. "He’s no
gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it."

All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a
molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the grasshoppers kept up their
shrill chirping—and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a
tangible thing.

Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered, and
as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the
endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them up
and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities, and