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Leander, his eyes bright with excitement at being received in the family circle on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of his chair, anticipating dismissal. "Chugg’s never ben so late as this," said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending forth flame.
They greeted him heartily, all but Judith, who did not trust herself to speak to him before the prying eyes of Mrs. Dax, and escaped to the house. Chugg’s latest excursion into oblivion had resulted in a fall from the box. He was not badly hurt, and recuperation was largely a matter of "sleeping it off," concluded Peter Hamilton’s bulletin of the condition of the stage-driver.
Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water. Furthermore, she could "bring about a dried-apple pie" to make a man forget the cooking of his mother.
"Wonder who she was?" said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a poor relation whose surmise had been accepted. But Mrs. Dax had evidently decided that Leander had gone far enough. "Was you expectin’ any of your lady friends by Chugg’s stage that you are so frettin’ anxious?" she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed miserably.
The Rodneys At Home All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg’s flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises.
Chugg’s mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in silence with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered to himself rather than to the fat lady, "Nowhere’s safe from ’em; women and house-flies is universally prevailing." The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. "He’s no gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it."
Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist’s sign. This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s earliest manhood. It had been his only love—till he met Mountain Pink.
When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom and set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg’s stocking, and on his stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon cottage every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon County. Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink.
The fat lady had never relaxed her gaze from Chugg’s back since the stage had started. She peered at that broad expanse of flannel shirt through the tiny round window, like a careful sailing-master sweeping the horizon for possible storm-clouds.
His delinquencies had deflected the course of the travellers, left them stranded in a remote corner of the wilderness; but now they should again resume the thread of things; Chugg’s coming was an event. "’Tain’t Chugg, by God!" said Leander, impelled to violent language by the unexpected. "It’s Peter Hamilton!" exclaimed Mrs. Dax. "Land’s sakes, the New-Yorker!" said the fat lady.
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