There was peace and harmony in the home of the Reverend Taylor. An air of neatness and prosperity was about his four-room adobe house. The mocking-bird that hung in a willow cage against the white wall, by the door, whistled sweet mimicry of the cheep of the little chickens in the back yard, and hopped to and fro and up and down on his perches, pecking at the red chili between the bars. From the corner of his eyes he could peek into the window, and it was bright with potted geraniums, white as the wall, or red as the chili, or pink as the little crumpled palm that patted against the glass to him.

He whistled more cheerily yet when he saw that small hand. He was a tame mocking-bird, and he had learned to eat dead flies from it. That was one of the greatest treats of his highly satisfactory life. The hand left the window and presently waved from the doorway.

The Reverend Taylor stood there with his son in his arms. The mocking-bird trilled out a laugh to the evening air. It was irresistible, so droll that even a bird must know it,—the likeness between the little father and the little son. There was the same big head and the big ears and the big eyes and the body[Pg 247] that was too small for them all, a little, thin body, active and quivering with energy. There were the very same wrinkles about the baby\'s lids, crinkles of good humor and kindly tolerance, and the very same tufts of hair running the wrong way and sticking out at the temples.

The tufts were fuzzy yellow instead of gray, and the miniature face had not yet grown tanned and hard with the wind and the sun, but those were mere details. The general effect was perfect. There was no mistaking that the lively fraction of humanity in the Reverend Taylor\'s arms was the little Reverend. That was the only name he went by, though he had been christened properly on the day he was six months old, Joshua for his father and Randolph for his mother, in memory of Virginia, and her own long maidenhood. She was herself a Randolph, and she wanted the fact perpetuated. But in Tombstone, Joshua Randolph Taylor was simply the little Reverend.

The little Reverend was the first thing on earth to his father. For the wife had made that step in advance, which is yet a step in descent in a woman\'s life, when she becomes to her husband less herself than the mother of his child.

The Reverend Taylor grabbed at a fly and caught it in his palm. He had become very expert at this, to his wife\'s admiration and his son\'s keen delight. It was because the little Reverend liked to see him do it, and derived so much elfish enjoyment from the trick, that he had perfected himself in it. He gave the[Pg 248] crushed fly to the baby, and held him up to feed the bird. The bird put its head through the bars and pecked with its whiskered bill, and the little Reverend gurgled joyfully, his small face wrinkling up in a way which was really not pretty, but which his father thought the most engaging expression in the world.

The puppy which had been born the same day as the little Reverend, a beast half coyote, half shepherd, and wholly hideous, came and sat itself down beside them on the sill, looked up with its tongue hanging out to one side, and smiled widely. The beaming good nature of the two Reverends was infectious. The baby squealed gleefully, and kicked until it was set down on the doorstep to pat the dog.

Presently the nurse came, a big, fat Mexican woman, with all her people\'s love of children showing on her moon face as she put out her arms. She had been with the Taylors since before the baby\'s birth, and she had more of its affection than the mother.

The little Reverend understood only Spanish, and his few words, pronounced with a precision altogether in keeping with his appearance, were Spanish ones. The old nurse murmured softly, as she took him up, "Quieres leche hombrecito, quieres cenar? El chuchu tiene hambre tambien. Vamos á ver mamá."

The little Reverend was not to be blandished. He was willing to go because it was his supper time and he knew it, but the big-eyed look of understanding he turned up to the gentle, fat face said plainly enough that he was too wise a creature to be wheedled. He [Pg 249]submitted to be carried in, but he cast a regretful glance at the "chuchu," which sat still in the doorway, and at his father, who was watching the line of flying ants making their way, a stream of red bodies and sizzing white wings, out of the window and across the street.

They had been doing that for three days. They came down the chimney, made across the floor in a line that never changed direction, nor straggled, nor lessened, up the wall and out a crack in the window. They did no harm, but followed blindly on in the path the first one had taken. And the minister had said they should not be smoked back or thwarted.

The little Reverend had been much interested in them also. He had sat for several hours sucking an empty spool, and observing them narrowly, in perfect silence. His father had great hopes of him as a naturalist.

Finally the minister raised his eyes and looked down the street. It was almost empty, save for two men in high-heeled top boots and sombreros who sat in chairs tilted back against the post-office wall, meditating in mutual silence. The only sounds were the rattling of dishes over in his mother-in-law\'s restaurant across the street, and the sleepy cheeping of the little chickens in his own back yard, as they cuddled under their mother\'s wing.

The Reverend Taylor was about to go to the coops and close them for the night, when he saw a man and a woman on horseback coming up the street. The woman was bending forward and swaying in her saddle. He stood still and watched. The red sunset[Pg 250] blaze was in his face so that he could not see plainly until they were quite near. Then he knew that it was Cairness and—yes, beyond a doubt—Bill Lawton\'s runaway wife.

They halted in front of him, and the woman swayed again, so much that he ran to her side. But she righted herself fiercely. Cairness was dismounted and was beside her, too, in an instant. He lifted her from the horse, pulled her down, more or less; she was much too ungainly to handle with any grace.

"May I take her in?" he said, nodding toward the open door.

"Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate.

Cairness put his arm around the big angular shoulders and helped her into the sitting room. She dropped down upon the sofa, and sat there, her head hanging, but in sullenness, not humility.

Mrs. Taylor came to the dining-room door and looked in. "Can I do anything?" she asked.

"Come in," said her husband. He was pouring out a drink of whiskey.

She came and stood watching, asking no questions, while the woman on the sofa gulped down the raw whiskey and gave back the glass.

[Pg 251]

Cairness had gone out to hitch the horses. When he came in he spoke to Mrs. Lawton, as one possessed of authority. He told her to lie down if she wanted to. "With your leave, Mrs. Taylor?" he added. Mrs. Taylor was already beside her, fussing kindly and being met with scant courtesy.

Cairness took the Reverend Taylor to the door. "You know that is Bill Lawton\'s wife?" he said.

Taylor nodded.

"The one who sloped with the Greaser?"

The parson nodded again.

"Do you object to taking her into your house for a short time?"

The Reverend Taylor did not object.

"And your wife?"

"She will shrink, I guess, at first," he admitted. "Women who ain\'t seen much of life kind of think they ought to draw aside their skirts, and all that. They were taught copy-book morals about touching pitch, I reckon,"—he was wise concerning women now—"and it takes a good deal of hard experience to teach them that it ain\'t so. But she\'ll take my word for it."

"She is ill, you see?"

The parson had seen.

"She may be ill some time. Would it be asking too much of you to look after her?" The bachelor showed in that.

Taylor realized from the Benedict\'s greater knowledge that it was asking a great deal, but still not[Pg 252] too much. He assured Cairness that she should be cared for.

"She was a captive among the Chiricahuas up in the Sierra Madre. She\'s had a hard time of it. That and the return march have been too much for her."

The parson expressed pity—and felt it, which is more.

"Yes," Cairness said, "of course it\'s hard luck, but she\'s deserved it all, and more too. You may as well know the whole thing now. It\'s only fair. She and her husband were the cause of the Kirby massacre. Drove off the stock from the corrals and left them no escape."

His teeth set. The little man gasped audibly. "Good God!" he said, "I—" he stopped.

"I rather thought that might be too much for even you," said Cairness.

"No, no; it\'s a good deal, but it ain\'t too much. Not that it could be more, very well," he added, and he glanced furtively at the woman within, who had stretched out on the lounge with her face to the wall. Mrs. Taylor was fanning her.

"You will still keep her then?" Cairness wished to know.

He would still keep her, yes. But he did not see that it would be in the least necessary to tell his wife the whole of the woman\'s iniquity. It took quite all his courage, after they had gotten her safely in bed, to remind her that this was the same woman who had gone off with the Mexican.

[Pg 253]

Mrs. Taylor folded her hands in her lap, and simply looked at him.

"Well?" said he, questioningly, setting his mouth. It answered to the duellist\'s "On guard!" She had seen him set his mouth before, and she knew that it meant that he was not to be opposed. Nevertheless there was a principle involved now. It must be fought for. And it would be the first fight of their marriage, too. As he had told Cairness once, she was very amiable.

"Well," she answered, "I think you have done an unspeakable thing, that is all."

"Such as—"

"To have brought an abandoned woman into our home."

"If her presence blackens the walls, we will have them whitewashed."

But she was not to be turned off with levity. It was a serious matter, involving consequences of the sternest sort. Mrs. Taylor was of the class of minds which holds that just such laxities as this strike at the root of society. "It is not a joke, Joshua. She pollutes our home."

"Are you afraid she will contaminate me?" he asked. He was peering at her over the top of a newspaper.

She denied the idea emphatically.

"Baby, then?"

Equally absurd.

"Or the nurse?"

It was too foolish to answer.

[Pg 254]

"Then," said the Reverend Taylor, laying down the paper, "you must be scared for yourself."

"Never!" she declared; it was merely because she could not breathe the same air with that creature.

"I wonder, my dear, what sort of air you breathed in your mother\'s restaurant at meal times?"

Mrs. Taylor was silent. Her pop blue eyes shifted.

"Trouble is," he went on evenly, "trouble is, that, like most women, you\'ve been brought up to take copy-book sentiments about touchin\' pitch, and all that, literal. You don\'t stop to remember that to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man. If she can\'t do you any harm spiritually, she certainly ain\'t got the strength to do it physically. I can\'t say as I\'d like to have her about the place all the time unless she was going to reform,—and I don\'t take much stock in change of heart, with her sort,—because she wouldn\'t be a pleasant companion, and it ain\'t well to countenance vice. But while she\'s sick, and it will oblige Cairness, she can have the shelter of my manta. You think so too, now, don\'t you?" he soothed.

But she was not sure that she thought so. She wanted to know why the woman could not be sent to the hotel, and he explained that Cairness wished a very close watch kept on her until she was able to be up. Curiosity got the better of outraged virtue then. "Why?" she asked, and leaned forward eagerly.

But the Reverend Taylor\'s lips set again, and he shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I\'m not certain myself," he said shortly.

[Pg 255]

An eminent student of the sex has somewhere said that women are like monkeys, in that they are imitative. The comparison goes further. There is a certain inability in a monkey to follow out a train of thought, or of action, to its conclusion, which is shared by the major part of womankind. It is a feminine characteristic to spend life and much energy on side issues. The lady forgot almost all about her original premise. She wished especially to know that which no power upon earth would induce her lord to tell.

He took up his paper again. "He ain\'t told me th............