"Oh, very well!"
So for eight miles of a road that led between green fields on our right and a rolling expanse of sagebrush on our left, I heard something like this:
"Well, this prominent club lady had been out on the Coast for some time heading movements and telling people how to do things, and she had got run down. She's a friend of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway, the well-known social leader and club president of Yonkers, who is an old friend of mine; and Mrs. W.B. writes that dear Julia is giving her life to the cause—I forget what cause it was right then—and how would it be for me to have her up here on the ranch for a vacation, where she could recover her spirits and be once more fitted to enter the arena. I say I'm only too glad to oblige, and the lady comes along.
"She seemed right human at first—kind of haggard and overtrained, but with plenty of fights left in her; a lady from forty-eight to fifty-four, with a fine hearty manner that must go well on a platform, and a kind of accusing face. That's the only word I can think of for it. She'd be pretty busy a good part of the day with pamphlets and papers that she or someone else had wrote, but I finally managed to get her out on a gentle old horse—that one you're riding—so she could liven up some; and we got along quite well together.
"The only thing that kind of went against me was, she's one of them that thinks a kind word and a pleasant smile will get 'em anywhere, and she worked both on me a little too much like it was something professional.
"Still, I put it by and listened to her tell about the awful state the world is in, and how a few earnest women could set it right in a week if it wasn't for the police.
"Prison reform, for instance. That was the first topic on which she delivered addresses to me. I couldn't make much out of it, except that we don't rely enough on our convicts' rugged honour. It was only a side line with her; still, she didn't slight it. She could talk at length about the innate sterling goodness of the misunderstood burglar. I got tired of it. I told her one day that, if you come right down to it, I'd bet the men inside penitentiaries didn't average up one bit higher morally than the men outside. She said, with her pleasantest smile, that I didn't understand; so I never tried to after that.
"The lady had a prowling mind. Mebbe that ain't the right word, but it come to me soon after she got here. I think it was the day she begun about our drinking water. She wanted to know what the analysis showed it to contain. She was scared out of her pleasant smile for a minute when she found I'd never had the water analyzed. I thought, first, the poor thing had been reading these beer advertisements; you know—the kind they print asking if you are certain about the purity of your drinking water, telling of the fatal germs that will probably be swimming there, and intimating that probably the only dead-safe bet when you are thirsty is a pint of their pure, wholesome beer, which never yet gave typhoid fever to any one. But, no; Julia just thought all water ought to be analyzed on general principles, and wouldn't I have a sample of ours sent off at once? She'd filled a bottle with some and suggested it with her pleasantest platform smile.
"'Yes,' I says; 'and suppose the report comes back that this water is fatal to man and beast? And it's the only water round here. What then? I'd be in a hell of a fix—wouldn't I?'
"I don't deny I used to fall back on words now and then when her smile got to me. And we went right on using water that might or might not make spicy reading in a chemist's report; I only been here thirty years and it's too soon to tell. Anyway, it was then I see she was gifted with a prowling mind, which is all I can think of to call it. It went with her accusing face. She didn't think anything in this world was as near right as it could be made by some good woman.