"Of course she had other things besides the water to worry about. She was a writer, too. She would write about how friction in the home life may be avoided by one of the parties giving in to the other and letting the wife say how the money shall be spent, and pieces about what the young girl should do next, and what the young wife should do if necessary, and so on. For some reason she was paid money for these pieces.
"However, she was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked to the bone, and Dave doing nothing but play on a cheap fiddle! How did they get their bread from day to day?
"I told her no one in the wide world had ever been able to answer this puzzle. There was Dave and his wife and five children, all healthy, and eating somehow, and Dave never doing a stroke of work he could side-step. I told her it was such a familiar puzzle we'd quit being puzzled by it.
"She said someone ought to smash his fiddle and make him work. She said she would do something about it. I applauded. I said we needed new blood up here and she seemed to of fetched it.
"She come back the next day with a flush of triumph on her severely simple face. And guess the first thing she asked me to do! She asked me to take chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the woman at that moment.
"'There they are, penniless,' says she, 'and in want for the barest necessities; and this man fiddling his time away! I had a struggle persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I've handled harder cases. You should of seen the light in the mother's wan face when he consented! The twelve dollars won't be much, though it will do something for her and those starving children; and then he will no longer have the instrument to tempt him.'
"I handed over a dollar for two chances right quick, and Julia went out to the bunk-house and wormed two dollars out of the boys there. And next day she was out selling off the other chances. She didn't dislike the work. It give her a chance to enter our homes and see if they needed reforming, and if the children was subjected to refining influences, and so on. The first day she scared parties into taking fifteen tickets, and the second day she got rid of the rest; and the next Sunday she held the drawing over at Dave's house. The fiddle was won by a nester from over in Surprise Valley, who had always believed he could play one if he only had a fair chance.
"So this good deed was now completed, there being no music, and twelve dollars in the Pickens home that night. And Mrs. Julia now felt that she was ready for the next big feat of uplift, which was a lot more important because it involved the very sanctity of the marriage tie. Yes, sir; she'd come back from her prowling one night and told me in a hushed voice, behind a closed door, about a couple that had been for years living in a state of open immorality.
"I didn't get her, at first, not thinking of Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie. But she meant just them two. I give her a good hearty laugh, at first; but it pained her so much I let her talk. It seems she'd gone there to sell raffle tickets, and they'd taken four, and cooked food for her, and give her some cherry cordial, which she took on account of being far from a strong woman; and then Aunt Mollie had told all her past life, with this horrid scandal about the notary public sticking innocently out of it.
"Mrs. Julia hadn't been able to see anything but the scandal, she being an expert in that line. So she had started in to persuade Aunt Mollie that it was her sacred duty to be married decently to her companion in crime for forty years. And Aunt Mollie had been right taken with the idea; in fact, she had entered into it with a social enthusiasm that didn't seem to Mrs. Julia to have quite enough womanly shame for her dark past in it. Still, anything to get the guilty couple lawful wedded; and before she left it was all fixed. Uncle Henry was to make an honest woman of Aunt Mollie as soon as she could get her trousseau ready.