His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and perhaps handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice. She looked for nothing better than everlasting work—the chafing detail of housework—and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal of downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail-way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in very wholesome awe of his sister, had scoured the woods on a pony in search, that dress never arrived. So, with sorrow in her heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, she waited upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them for the wants that stood between her and her need for tears. It was a genuine little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice, rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit.
These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and whispering night, loafing round the little house with California, who un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little boarded bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland and the old man.
Most of the yarns began in this way:—“Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of Lone County, Montana,” or “There was a man riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus,” or “'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom, a woman from Monterey,” etc.
You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were.
IV. THE YELLOWSTONE
ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place, and that carter turned his team into his friend's team, howling:—“Get out o' this, Jim. All hell's alight under our noses!”