CHAPTER I.
PIZEN KATE.
The ungainly female who came roaring into Eldorado in search of the husband who “run away” from her contrived to draw a crowd about her in a remarkably short time.
“I’m Pizen Kate, from Kansas City!” she yelled. “Git out of my way, er I’ll jab yer eye out with my umbreller. I’m lookin’ fer my husband, and you ain’t him. Think I’d take up with a weasel-faced, bow-legged speciment like you? Not on your tintype. I wouldn’t! So, git out o’ my way!”
The man had tried to “chaff” her and had roused her ire, but he fell back before the angry jabs of her “umbreller.”
She looked about, glaring.
She was “homely as sin.” Her features were not only irregular; they were twisted, gnarled, and seamed. A few thin hairs of an attempted beard floated from a mole on her chin, and on her upper lip there was a faint trace of a mustache. She was dressed in a soiled cotton garment, and on her head was a shapeless hat, with a faded red rose for ornament. In her muscular right hand she flourished an ancient umbrella.
“I heard my husband had come here, and I’m lookin’ fer him,” she declared. “He run away from me in Kansas City, and I set out to foller him; and I’ll foller him to the end o’ the earth but that I git him.”
“I’m bettin’ on you, all right!” called out some irreverent individual.
She fixed him with a glassy stare.
“Was I ’specially directin’ my langwidge to you?” she demanded. “I hate to hear a horse bray out that way. It’s sickenin’.”