"
It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In
wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she
bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.
"Yes, sir, I hadn't been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood
like that. Gee! How good it felt to get into 'em and banish that
sideshow tent of a skirt. I'd never known a free moment before and I
blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it. Then, proud as Punch,
what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt
Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free
life I was now leading in the Far West. And what do I get for it but a
tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor,
the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of
Sister Baxter's appeal to me--asking why do I parade myself shamelessly
in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to
the true nobility that must still be in my nature but which I am
forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on! The picture had
been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and
they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation
and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would
not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.
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