"
It sounded promising enough, and the dust had now settled so that I
could dimly make out the noble lines of my hostess. I begged for more.
"Well, go on--Mrs. Burchell Daggett once nearly forgot her womanhood.
Certainly, go on, if it's anything that would be told outside of a
smoking-car."
The lady grinned.
"Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she
confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that
album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up
once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!"
She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately
constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its
pedestal. "Get me there, do you?"
It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding
skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held
a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive
disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late
Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.
"Very well--now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month.
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