Part 8 (2/2)
”Could you smell it?” questioned Mary, anxiously.
”You never can tell that way, when they are plumb pickled in it, like him.”
”Then how did you know it wasn't coffee?”
”His eyes had fresh watered.”
Mary collapsed under this expert testimony. ”What are we going to do about it?”
”Appeal to him as a gentleman,” said the fat lady, not without dramatic intonation.
”You appeal,” counselled Mary; ”I saw him look at you admiringly when you were walking down that steep grade.”
”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 gra.s.shoppers 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 sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:
”'Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.'
The words came low and mournfully From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay On his dying couch at the close of day.”
The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was driving ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweet.w.a.ter, who began, in the maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings, and who steadily grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he reached the alt.i.tude of six feet four, growing hourly in height and fierceness.
But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the ”Ballad of the Mule-Skinner,”
with what seemed to both terrified pa.s.sengers an awful warning of their overthrow:
”As I was going down the road, With a tired team and a heavy load, I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung- The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung, The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue-”
This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at intervals during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to escape without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed lives.
At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing Leander's compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the place was certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make acquaintances through the columns of _The Heart and Hand_. The house stood solitary in that scourge of desolation. The windows and doors gaped wide like the unclosed eyes of a dead man on a battle-field. Chugg halloed, and an old white horse put his head out of the door, shook it upward as if in a.s.sent, then trotted off.
”That's Jerry, and he's the intelligentest animal I ever see,” remarked the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry's good qualities, and presently Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the corner of the house.
This Mr. Dax was almost an exact replica of the other, even to the apologetic crook in the knees and a certain furtive way of glancing over the shoulder as if antic.i.p.ating missiles.
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