My one experience with Miss Mittie showed me what she was. It was in the days when they were wearing yard-long hat-pins as articles of warfare. I went into the store to buy two short ones, and Holy Calm showed me a cushionful of rapiers, and told me “those were all they had now.”
There was just something in the way she said it that “got” me. I retorted that she didn’t know her stock—that I had bought proper hat-pins there three months before on my way up to the ranch, and there were a million of ’em still in a box.
“Oh, only two sold,” said she, taking it for truth, though never till that instant had she set eyes on me. “Then they must all be here except those two,” and with that, she drew out a box marked “ruching” in black letters six inches long. It contained ruching.
Miss Mittie only murmured apologetically to the box, “Not here, I see,” and drew forth another marked “stocks” containing stocks, and then one marked “gloves” containing gloves, and a fourth marked “ties” containing ties.
At this point my wickedness took me, and I showed her a box marked “corsets” containing corsets, a box marked “baby ribbon” containing baby ribbon, a box marked “embroidery cotton” containing embroidery cotton; after which I swept a commanding gesture over a table where silk hose were displayed and said artfully, “You’d better look under those stockings.”
She thanked me for the kind suggestion and conscientiously turned over every pair, soberly telling me, when she was through, she “didn’t see any hat-pins.” Neither did she see the glitter in my eye nor hear the derision in my voice; she positively never suspected that I was “doing her” in a way that would have reduced a New York “saleslady” either to rage or a red-faced pulp. I’d have kept it up for an hour until I forced her to show some sign of human feeling, but time was pressing, and I couldn’t sacrifice my sleeping-car berth east for the fine sport of baiting her Holy Calm. I stepped behind the counter and took a box, in full sight all the time, marked “hat-pins—short,” opened it, and put it in her hand.
No written words can convey the manner in which she said, “Oh, yes—two of those. Ten cents,” and wrote her slip.
I went off feeling defeated—the calm had never quivered; I had mentally made no more impression on her than if she’d been a waxwork.
But it had been borne in upon me that Miss Mittie’s soul needed saving to a world of human endeavor—that she was in bondage to some intangible inner force; and I was still thinking of her as a psychological phenomenon, wondering how a person so devoid of perception and imagination could contrive to earn her daily bread even in Wyoming, where the stress of commercial conditions is much easier than in the East, when the porter took my suitcase from Roddy’s hand and he cheered me off.
Roddy had driven me down from the ranch,—an all-day trip across the plains, with a sandwich lunch in the middle,—and he had made use of the opportunity to tell me the whole, true story of his life. He was emphatic on the truth of it, and said that I ought to write it up for the New York papers; and with this in view he went into details that would have made me faint away if they had been true. But knowing Roddy after three summers of him, I took his recitation quietly. My vague “Did you’s?” annoyed him but stimulated him to larger invention; and when at last we reached Laramie, he was in fine fettle for an adventure that would eclipse all the rest.