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"Perhaps their skulls were a heap frailer than I allowed for at the time," said Mrs. Yellett, with similar remoteness, yet with a twinkle that showed Mary she understood the situation. "An infant’s skull doesn’t stand much knocking about, I suppose, Mrs. Yellett?" "Not a great deal, if there ain’t plenty of vinegar and brown paper handy, and I seldom had such fancy fixings in camp.
"Yes," answered Mrs. Yellett, reflectively, "Leander’s mouth do run about eight and a half octaves. Sometimes I don’t blame his wife for bangin’ down the lid." They talked of Jim Rodney’s troubles, and the growing hatred between sheep and cattle men, because of range rights. "Now that pore Jim had a heap of good citizen in him, before that pestiferous cattle outfit druv’ his sheep over the cliff.
Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions. Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael. "God A’mighty!" she said, "he’s lost his false teeth!" And without another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell little short of sleight-of-hand.
She proposed a bewildering choice—an inverted wash-tub, two buckets sustaining the relation of caryatides to a board, the sheet-iron cooking-stove. In an excess of solicitude she even suggested robbing "paw" of his soap-box. Mary chose the wash-tub on condition that Mrs. Yellett consented to sacrifice the handles in the cause of lower education.
Yellett picked up Mary’s trunk and bags and stowed them in the back of the buckboard with the ease with which another woman might handle pasteboard boxes. One or two of the male Rodneys offered to help, but she waved them aside and lashed the luggage to the buckboard, handling the ropes with the skill of an old sailor.
Yellett that without that symbol of scholastic authority, a desk, the wagon seat was useless. Nevertheless, Mary set forth, with all her eloquence, the mission of a desk. Mrs. Yellett was genuinely depressed. Had she imported the magician without his wand—Aladdin without his lamp?
Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire, putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various was her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple domestic tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the cloud-burst.
From the buckboard stepped a figure whose agility was compatible with her driving. No sketchy outline can do justice to Mrs. Yellett or her costume. Like the bee, the ant, and other wonders of the economy of nature, she was not to be disposed of with a glance.
She felt that she had come West with but one eye, as it were, and countless prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were fast becoming increased a hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she reflected, as she sat smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs. Yellett, how over-serious to those who did not know Leander!
The youngest child can read it without asking a single embarrassing question of its elder, and the oldest sinner can read it without having any fleshly meditations intrudin’ on his piety." The Yellett family had by this time dispersed itself for the afternoon, and the matriarch and the two girls started in to clear away the meal and wash the dishes.
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