“What do you think of it?” inquired Mrs. Yellett, smilingly, anticipating a favorable answer.
“It’s almost too beautiful to leave.” Mary innocently supposed that Mrs. Yellett referred to the starlit landscape. “But I’m so tired, Mrs. Yellett, and so glad to get to a real home at last, that I’m going to ask if you will not show me the way to the house so that I may go to bed right away.”
This apparently reasonable request was greeted by a fine chorus of titanic laughter from Mary’s pupils. Mrs. Yellett waved her hand over the surrounding landscape in comprehensive gesture.
“Ain’t all this large enough for you?” she asked, gayly.
“You mean the mountains? They’re wonderful. But—I really think I’d like to go in the house.”
“I shore hope you ain’t figgerin’ on goin’ into no house, ’cause there ain’t no house to go into.” She laughed merrily, as if the idea of such an effete luxury as a house were amusing. “This yere family ’ain’t ever had a house—it camps.”
Mary gasped. The real meaning of words no longer had the power of making an impression on her. If Mrs. Yellett had announced that they were in the habit of sleeping in the moon, it would not have surprised her.
“If you are tired, an’ want to go to bed, you can shuck off and lie down any time. Ben, Jack, Ned, go an’ set with paw in the tent while the gov’ment gets ready for bed. Cacta and Clem, you help me with them quilts.”
Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked her, with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as to the location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep “light or dark.” She chose “dark” at random, hating to display her ignorance of the alternatives, with the happy result that her bed was made up to leeward of the great sheep-wagon, in a nice little corner of the State of Wyoming. Mary was grateful that she had chosen dark.
As she dozed off, she was reminded of a certain magazine illustration that Archie had pinned over his bed after the aunts had given a grudging consent to this westward journey. There was a line beneath the pictorial decoy which read: “Ranch Life in the New West.” And there were piazzas with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a tea-table with a samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring tea. The stern reality apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains, with houses of the packing-box school of architecture at a distance of seventy or eighty miles apart. No ladies in white muslin poured tea; they garbed themselves in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had an acrid, personal note. But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that picture, and that he thought of her in such ideal surroundings.