"So you've got to marry him, eh?" and I led her on to talk about herself, the only topic she had for conversation.
Miss Burrows, was, I believe, not fortunate in the selection of her parents, and had been adopted at the age of fourteen by an uncle, Eliphalet P. Burrows, known as Loco, because he happened to be cracked. He was caretaker at a bankrupt mine near Helena, absorbed in a fool invention which used up all his wages, and glad to have Miss Violet because she was cheap. A servant would expect to be paid.
To those who have eyes, ears and a heart, the wilderness gives a better education than the schools, but the girl turned her back on that, sprawling in the parlor with windows draped to shut out all things beautiful. The place was full of shams and plush vulgarities, and there she spent her leisure reading novels.
Now fiction honestly made by craftsmen may be true to human life, and at its best a mirror reflecting the world. But an average novel depicts a hero perfectly sweet, canned virtue, guaranteed bullet proof; and a heroine who is potted chastity and warranted tender: two figures void of human character, whose respectable passions are thwarted for about three hundred pages, saleable at one dollar and thirty-five cents. Then they marry, and live happily ever after. Truth may be stranger than that—but I have doubts.
Miss Violet's novels depicted villains of spotless blackness, the good flawlessly innocent but painfully underfed. Vice lived in guilty splendor, wicked earls lunched in their coronets, lurid adventuresses went hurtling to the bad, and nobody had the slightest sense of humor. She fed on offal.
Old Burrows had a stepson, young Joe Chambers, a cow-hand earning forty dollars a month, a decent fellow, tongue-tied and a lout, but with the makings of a first-rate husband. He spent his money on presents, his spare time in devotion, while Miss Violet, who had nobody else to flirt with, made love to him out of books, had him for dummy to keep herself in practise, and wrecked his life without the least compunction.
She waited for the lover of her dreams, the hero of fiction, and in this condition replied to my mock advertisement in the Matrimonial Ashbin. Some shreds or casual patches of modesty impelled her to send the portrait of a repulsive aunt, and to fit herself out in bogus widowhood.
Decent women avoid that sort of correspondence, and our boys of C Troop felt that the girls who made love by post were fair game for any sort of lark. For the sheer repulsiveness of the photograph she sent, this correspondence was a standing joke in the troop until Inspector Sarde was fool enough to take her seriously. She sent him a photograph of herself and dropped the pose of widow. I sent her ample warning.
Had she shown my letter to her lover, Joe would have ridden across and shot me. Had she shown it to Uncle Loco, he would have prated and been tiresome. Even her conscience told her she had laid herself open to insult and as a matter of common sense, had better take no risk of something worse. But her vanity had been wounded and in a silly rage, she must needs get even. She would take my advice and lead Sarde on into a promise of marriage, then if he broke his pledge threaten an action at law.
So came Sarde's photograph in uniform, and with quite regular features and a viking mustache he seemed her ideal lover, her hero of fiction. He wrote too as lonely men are apt to do. After all, he held Her Majesty's Commission in a distinguished corps, had official rank as a gentleman, was ex-officio justice of the peace, could give her a social position, offered marriage, and was now in earnest. The poor fool thought herself in love.