Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A roll-towel, more frankly significant of the multitude of the Rodneys than had been the babel of voices, a discouraged fragment of comb, a tin basin, a slippery atom of soap, these Eudora proffered with an unction worthy of better things. "I declare Mist’ Chugg have scarce left any soap, an’ I don’t believe thar’s ’nother bit in the house."
In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.
His luck in these encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, "while he had been shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the old man yet." Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the manner of these frontiersmen.
Mary Carmichael and Judith promised to write—they had found a great deal to say to each other the preceding evening. Chugg cracked his whip ominously, the travellers got inside, not daring to trust themselves to the box.
And once, when the first pale streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that hung in the shabby old library at home. They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage.
There were some photographs and pictures hanging on the walls. The room was spotlessly clean and very tidy. Desmond remarked on this, asking if the police had put the room straight. Mr. Marigold looked quite shocked. "Oh, no, everything is just as it was when Mrs. Chugg found Miss Mackwayte this morning.
He and Desmond followed the detective upstairs, whilst Mrs. Chugg resentfully resumed her seat by the fire. On her face was the look of one who has cast pearls before swine. "Any finger-prints?" asked the Chief in the hall. "Oh, no," he said, "Barney's far too old a hand for that sort o' thing!"
His bitterness found vent in tipping over the stage when his passengers were confined to members of the former Mrs. Bosky’s sex, and, as Leander said, "the flask in his innerds held more." And these were the only traces of tragedy in the life of Lemuel Chugg, stage-driver.
Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her hand-bag, which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its surroundings, was resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had been lifted by Chugg.
Mountain Pink coyly took the stocking so generously given for the divorce and subsequent trousseau, and Chugg continued to drive his stage with an Apollo-like abandon, whistling love-songs the while. Coincident with Mountain Pink’s disappearance Dakotaward, in the interests of freedom, went also one Bob Catlin, a mule-wrangler.
Word Of The Day