Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/89

 burlesque queen in Cheyenne—for this brood of likely youngsters the sheep queen's buck-skin money bag would ever yawn its widest.

Woolly Annie preserved no vain illusions on the subject of personal adornment. She realized most sensibly that the task of landscaping her in terms of laces and organdies would be equivalent to planting Sleepy Ned Mountain to geraniums and myrtles. But for Cathay, her eldest, for Ravenna, Sophia, Christiania and Perugia—all born during the term of subscription to the World's Atlas and Book of Knowledge, dollar down and five ditto a year—for these fortunate ones Two Moons' best was little enough.

"I 've spent my life raisin' sheep an' children," was the lady's usual summary of her philosophy of work. "A sheep 's dressed by nature, but a kid 's like a painted picture—you gotta touch it up, an' the artisticer the better, I says."

Woolly Annie and Phenie were the center of a small maelstrom in the Boston Cash Store. The giantess from Poison Spider was standing, booted feet wide apart, bold eye ranging the stocked shelves and upon her broad cheeks a mantling flush of triumph. What she