Page:The New Penelope.djvu/189

 so anxious as to telegraph? Such an expense and loss of time!—and all because he felt so uneasy about his wife!"

The bullet-headed young Irishman said nothing. He was about half asleep from brandy and last night's travel; too stupid to know that his hat had flown out of the window, and was bowling along in the wind and dust half a mile behind—all the better for his head, which looked at a red heat now.

The lady had lifted the rude men up to her level, when directly they were ashamed of their brandy and other vices, and began to show instinctive traits of gentlemen. By the time they arrived at the dinner station, where half an hour was allowed for food and rest out of the eighteen or twenty, she had at least two humble servitors, who showed great concern for her comfort.

The day began to wane. They had traveled continuously over a long stretch of plain between two mountain ranges, over a country entirely uninhabited except by the stage company's employees, who kept the stations and tended the stock. This lone woman had seen but one other woman on the road. Plenty of teams—great "prairie schooners," loaded with every conceivable thing for supplying the wants of an isolated non-producing community, and drawn by ten or fourteen mules—had been passed through the day.

As night fell, Mrs. Hastings saw what she had never before seen or imagined—the camps of these teamsters by the roadside; horses and mules staked, or tied to the wagons; the men lying prone upon the earth, wrapped in blankets, their dust-blackened faces turned up to the frosty twinkling stars. Did people really live in that way?—how many superfluous things were there in a city!

The night was moonless and clear, and cold as at that altitude they always are. Sleep, from the roughness of the road, was impossible. Her companions dozed, and woke with exclamations when the heavy lurchings of the coach