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Chugg, sir," said Mr. Marigold, "the charwoman who found the body!" The Chief and Desmond stood at the detective's side in the Mackwaytes' little dining-room. The room was in considerable disorder.
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.
Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered, and as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation.
Chugg halloed, and an old white horse put his head out of the door, shook it upward as if in assent, then trotted off. "That’s Jerry, and he’s the intelligentest animal I ever see," remarked the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry’s good qualities, and presently Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the corner of the house. This Mr.
'You lie still, Miss, says I, 'and I'll pop in and tell your pa to come in to you! Well; I went to the old genelmun's room. Empty!" Mrs. Chugg paused to give her narrative dramatic effect. "And where did you find Mr. Mackwayte?" asked the Chief in such a placid voice that Mrs. Chugg cast an indignant glance at him.
Only Judith Rodney, who said nothing, felt that he was spurring across the wilderness at breakneck speed to see a girl at Wetmore’s. But her lack of comment caused no ripple of surprise in the flow of loose-lipped speculation that served, for the time being, to inject a casual interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the verge of demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.
After supper, Chugg, with fresh horses to the stage, left Rodney’s, apparently for some port in that seemingly pathless sea of foot-hills. That there should be trails and defined routes over this vast, unvaried stretch of space seemed more wonderful to Mary than the charted high-roads of the Atlantic.
In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance. Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator, with absolute sway.
At every portion of the road presenting a steep decline she would prod Chugg in the back with the handle of her ample umbrella, and demand that he let her out, as she preferred walking. The stage-driver at first complied with these requests, but when he saw they threatened to become chronic, he would send his team galloping down grade at a rate to justify her liveliest fears.
She was like a flame, paling the sunlight. And presently was heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow and sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge that spanned the creek. "Chugg!" exclaimed Leander, rushing to the door in a tumult. There was something crucial in the arrival of the delayed stage-driver.
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