A ribbon of winding road leads northeast from the pueblo of Domingo and the snaky Bajada hill where gray rocks lie thickly; it is a yellowish ribbon of road, sweeping over the gigantic mesa toward Santa FÉ and the sweetly glowing Blood of Christ peaks—great peaks of green spearing into the sky, white-crested, and tipped with blood at sunset.

Along this ribbon of dusty yellow road was crawling a flivver. It was crawling slowly, in a jerky series of advances and pauses; as it crept along its intermittent course, the woman who sat behind the wheel was cursing her iron steed in a thorough and heartfelt manner.

Both in flivver and woman was that which fired curious interest. The rear of the car was piled high with boxes and luggage; certain of the boxes were marked “Explosives—Handle With Care!” Prominent among this freight was a burlap sack tied about the neck and firmly roped to one of the top supports of the car.

The woman was garbed in ragged but neat khaki. From beneath the edges of an old-fashioned bonnet, tied beneath the chin, protruded wisps of grayish hair, like an aureole of silver. The woman herself was of strikingly large frame and great in girth; her arms, bare to the elbows, were huge in size. Yet this giantess was not unhealthily fat. Hardened by toil, her hands were gripped carefully upon the steering wheel as though she were in some fear of wrenching it asunder in an unguarded moment.

Her features were large, sun-darkened, creased and seamed with crow’s-feet that betokened long exposure to wind and weather. Ever and anon she drew, with manifest enjoyment, at an old brown corncob pipe. Above her firm lips and beak-like nose a pair of blue eyes struck out gaily and keenly at the world; eyes of a piercing, intense blue, whose brilliancy, as of living jewels, gave the lie to their surrounding tokens of toil and age.

“Drat it!” she burst forth, after a new bucking endeavour on the part of the car. “If I was to shoot this damned thing through the innards, maybe she’d quit sunfishin’ on me! I’m goin’ to sell her to Santy FÉ sure’s shooting; I’ll get me a pair o’ mules and a wagon, then I’ll know what I’m doing. Dunno how come I ever was roped into buying this here contraption——”

She suddenly halted her observations. Laying aside her pipe and peering out from the side of the dusty windshield, her keen eyes narrowed upon the road ahead.

Against that yellowish ribbon, with its bordering emptiness of mesquite, greasewood, and sage, there was nothing moving; but squarely in the centre of the road showed up a dark, motionless blotch. It was the figure of a man lying as though asleep. No man would or could lie asleep in the middle of this road, however, under the withering blaze of the downpouring New Mexico sun.

Suddenly the fitful flivver coughed under more gas; it roared, bucked, darted ahead, bucked again, and a dozen yards from the prostrate man it went leaping forward as though impelled by vindictive spite to run over the motionless figure. The woman swore savagely. She seemed inexperienced as a chauffeuse; only by a hair’s breadth did she manage to avoid the man, and then she stopped the car.

Her great size became more apparent as she alighted. Standing, she gazed down at the man, then leaned forward and turned the unfortunate vagrant upon his back. The body was listless to her hand, the head lolled idly.

“Hm!” said the woman, reflectively. “Ain’t drunk. Ain’t hurt. Hm!”

She reached into the car and produced a whiskey flask, then sat down in the dust and took upon her ample lap the head of the senseless man. A sudden deftness became manifest in her motions, an unguessed tenderness relieved the harshness of her features.

“This here is breakin’ the law,” she ruminated, pouring liquor between the lips of the vagrant, “but it ain’t the first time Mehitabel Crump has broke laws to help some poor devil! Hm! Looks to me like he ain’t et for quite a spell.”

With increasing interest she surveyed the slowly reviving stranger.

He was fully as lank as she was stout, and must have stood a good six foot two in height. His clothes were tattered remnants of once sober black. Long locks of iron-gray hair hung about his ears. His features were careworn and haggard, yet in them lingered some indefinable suggestion of fine lines and deeply carven strength. Had Mehitabel Crump ever viewed Sir Henry Irving—which she had not—she might have guessed a few things about her “find.”

Suddenly the eyes, the intensely black eyes, of the man opened. So did his lips.

“Angels and ministers of grace!” His voice, although faint, was touched with a deep intonation, a roundness of the vowels, a clarity of accent. “As I do live and breathe, it is the kiss of lordly Bacchus which doth welcome me!”

“Take it calm,” advised Mehitabel Crump, pityingly. “You’ll have your right sense pretty soon. Many’s the time I’ve seen Crump keeled over, and come to with his mind awandering. Jest take it calm, pilgrim. I’ll have a bite o’ cornbread——”

She lowered his head to the dust, rose, and went to the flivver. Presently she returned with a slab of cold cornbread divided by bacon, and a desert water bottle.

“Heaps o’ lunch in the car.” She aided the gaunt one to sit up, and he clutched at the food feverishly. “My land! Ain’t et real frequent lately, have ye?”

The man, his mouth full, shook his head dumbly. About his eyes was a brilliancy which told of sheer starvation. To the full as worldly wise as any person in broad New Mexico, the woman asked no questions as yet; she procured from the car a basket which contained the remainder of her luncheon, and set forth the contents.

“Figgered I might get held up ’fore reaching Santy FÉ. If it warn’t that dratted car, it sure would be something else, which same it is. Damned good luck it ain’t worse, as Crump used to say when Providence went agin’ him.”

She observed that the stranger ate ravenously, but drank sparingly. Not thirst had downed him, but starvation.

He seemed startled at her disconcertingly frank manner of speech. She put him down as something better than an ordinary hobo; an out-of-luck Easterner, possibly a lunger. He was fifty or so; with decent clothes, a shave, and a haircut, he might be a striking-looking fellow, she decided. Although he had a hard mouth, what Mehitabel Crump had learned to know as a whiskey mouth, it was steady lipped.

“You sure played in tough luck comin’ this road,” she said, musingly. “So did I. Ain’t nothing between here and Santy FÉ ’cept Injuns, greasers, and rattlers, any one of which is worse’n the other two. These rocks is playin’ hell with my tires and the old Henry is coughin’ fit to bust her innards. If I find the feller who sold her to me, I’d sure lay him one over the ear!”

Her simple meal finished, she began to stuff her corncob pipe. The man, still eating wolfishly, watched her with fascinated eyes. She gazed out at the snowy, sun-flooded Sangre de Cristo peaks and continued her soliloquy. When it suited her, Mehitabel Crump could be very garrulous; and when it suited her, she could be as taciturn as the mountains themselves.

“I ain’t surprised at nothing no more, not these days. No, sir! When I first come to this country you knowed just what ye had to reckon agin’. They was Injuns to fight, greasers to work devilment, claim jumpers to rob ye, and such. But now the Injuns is all towerist peddlers, the greasers is called ‘natives’ and runs the courts an’ legislature, and gun toting ain’t popular. A lone woman gets skinned plumb legal, when in the old days it would ha’ been suicide to rob a female. Yes pilgrim, set right in at what’s left, and don’t bother to talk yet a spell.”

She touched a match to her pipe, broke the match, tossed it away.

“If Crump hadn’t blowed up with a dry fuse in a shaft we was sinking over in the Mogollons, where we was prospecting at the time, he’d be plumb astonished at the changes. Yes, and I bet he’d swear to see me driving one of them contraptions yonder! Poor Crump, I never had the heart to dig him up, though it was a right smart prospect we was workin’. But somehow I couldn’t never work that claim, with him still in it that-a-way. I won’t need the money, neither, if I’ve got hold of——”

She paused. Her gaze went to the devouring stranger. Abruptly she changed the subject.

“You don’t look like you was much more’n a poor, innercent pilgrim without any brains to mention. Yet, stranger, I’d gamble that we’d stack up high in morals agin’ such old-timers as Abel Dorales, him what’s half greaser and half Mormon, or old Sandy Mackintavers, what come straight from Scotland to Arizony and made a forchin in thirty years of thieving! Yes, I reckon ye’ve got a streak of real pay dirt in ye, stranger. And if I can’t tell what breed o’ cattle a man is by jest looking at him, it’s a queer thing! I’ve knowed ’em all.”

The complimented pilgrim bolted the last scrap of food in sight, raised the canvas bag to his lips, and drank. Sighing, he wiped his lips with the frayed cuff of his sleeve. Then he disentangled his long legs and rose. One hand upon his heart, the other flourished magnificently, he made a bow that was the piteous ghost of a perished grandeur.

“Madam!” His voice rang out firmly now, a deep and sonorous bass. “Madam, I thank you! In me you behold one who has received the plaudits of thousands, one who has bowed to the thunderous acclaim of——”

“What d’ye say your name was?” snapped Mehitabel Crump. Her voice was suddenly acid, her blue eyes ice. The other was manifestly disconcerted by her change of front.

“Madam, I am familiarly known as Thaddeus Roscius Shea. Under the more imposing title of Montalembert I have made known to thousands the aspiring genius of the immortal Avonian bard. I avow it, madam—I am a Thespian! I suit the action to the word, the word to the action——”

“Huh!” cut in his audience with a ruthless lack of awe. “Huh! Never heard of them Thespians, but likely it’s a new Mormon sect. I knowed a man of your name down to Silver City twelve year back; this Thady Shea was a good fightin’ man, with one eye and a harelip. Glad to meet ye, pilgrim! I’m Mehitabel Crump, with Mrs. for a handle.”

Something in her manner seemed mightily to embarrass Mr. Shea, but he took a fresh start and set forth to conquer the difficulty.

“Madam, a Thespian is of no religious persuasion, but one who treads the boards and who wears the buskin of Thespis. You behold in me the first tragedian of the age. My Hamlet, madam, has been praised by discerning critics from Medicine Hat to Jersey City. The accursed moving pictures have ruined my art.”

“Oh! It’s usually whiskey or woman,” said Mrs. Crump, her eyes ominous. “So you’re a stage actor, eh? Then that explains it.”

“Explains, madam? Explains what?” faltered Shea, sensing a gathering storm.

“Your damn foolishness. Shake it off, ye poor hobo! I no sooner hands ye a bit o’ kindness than it swells ye up like a balloon. Now, don’t you get gay with me, savvy? Don’t come none o’ that high-falutin’ talk with me, or by hell I’ll paralyze ye! I did think for a minute that ye had the makin’s of a man, but I apologize.”

The blue eyes turned away. Had Shea been able to see them, he might have read in them a look that did not correspond to Mrs. Crump’s spoken word. But he did not see them.

He turned away from the woman. The carven lines of his face deepened, aged, as from him was rent the veil of his posturing. A weary and hopeless sadness welled in his eyes; the sadness of one who beholds around him the wreckage of all his little world, brought down to ruin by his own faults. When he spoke, it was with the same sonorous voice, yet lacking the fine rolling accent.

“You are right, Mrs. Crump, you are right. God help me! I, who was once a man, am now less than the very dust. Your harshness is justified. At this time yesterday, madam, I was a wretched drunken fool, spouting lines of rhetoric in Albuquerque.”

“I’m surprised at that,” said Mrs. Crump. “How’d ye get the liquor, since this here state an’ nation ain’t particularly wet no more? And how ye got here from Albuquerque I don’t figger.”

“It is simply told.” From the miserable Shea was stripped the last vestige of his punctured pose. “Twenty years ago my young wife died, and I started upon the whiskey trail; it has led me—here. Yesterday I came into Albuquerque, starving. At the railroad station, amid some—er—confusion, I encountered a company of those motion picture men who dare to call themselves actors. So far was my pride broken that I begged of them help in the name and memory of The Profession.”

Shea emphatically capitalized these last two words.

“They took me aboard their train,” he pursued, “and I was given drink. Some controversy arose, I know not how; I found myself ignominiously ejected from the train. I walked, not knowing nor caring whither. Nor is that all, madam. I am a fugitive from justice!”

“Broke jail?” queried Mrs. Crump, betraying signs of interest.

“No, madam. In Albuquerque I was starving and desperate. I—I stole fruit and—sandwiches—from a railroad stand.”

His voice failed. He turned away, staring at the snowy peaks as though awaiting a verdict.

“Pretty low-down and worthless, ain’t ye?” Mrs. Crump checked herself suddenly, glancing at the yellow ribbon of road over which she had so recently come. A flying cloud of dust gave notice of the approach of a large automobile.

Suddenly rising, Mrs. Crump knocked out her pipe, then caught Shea by the shoulder. Her hand swung him about as though he were a child. His eyes widened in surprise upon meeting the warm regard in her face, the steady and sympathetic smile upon her lips.

“Thady,” she said, bluntly, “how old are ye?”

“Fifty-eight,” he mumbled in astonishment.

“Huh! Two year older’n me. Made a mess of your life, ain’t ye? Don’t know as I blame ye none, Thady. When Crump passed out, I come near throwin’ up the sponge; but I got to fightin’ and I been fightin’ ever since, and here I am! Now, Thady, you got strength and you got guts; I can see it in your eye. All ye need is backbone. Why don’t ye buck up?”

“I’ve tried,” he faltered, controlled by her personality. “It’s no use——”

“You go get in that car.” Mrs. Crump glanced again at the approaching automobile, then half flung the gaunt Shea toward her dust-white flivver. “Get in and don’t say a word, savvy? One thing about you, ye can be trusted—which is more’n can be said for some skunks in this here country! Get in, now, and leave me palaver with Sheriff Tracy.”

Shea, shivering at mention of the sheriff, jack-knifed his length upon the car’s front seat.

From some mysterious recess of her ample person Mrs. Crump produced an immense old-fashioned revolver, which she began to burnish with seeming absorption. The big automobile slowed up. It halted a few feet behind the flivver, and a hearty hail came forth.

“By jingoes, if it ain’t Mis’ Crump! Hello, old-timer—ain’t seen you in ages!”

From the car sprang a hale and vigorous man who advanced with hand extended.

“I kind o’ thought it was you, Sam Tracy,” said Mrs. Crump. “Thought I recognized that there car o’ yours. How’s the folks?”

“All fine. And you? But I needn’t ask—why, you grow younger every month——”

“See here! What ye doin’ over in this county, Sam? Why don’t ye get back to Bernalillo where ye belong?”

The sheriff waved his hand.

“Going to Santy FÉ. I’m looking up a fellow who came this way from Albuquerque—a hobo and sneak thief name o’ Shea. Where ye been keepin’ yourself, ma’am? It don’t seem like the same old state not to see ye from time to time.”

“Sam Tracy,” observed Mrs. Crump with a look of severity, “I’ve knowed you more years than I care to reckon up. And you know me, I guess! Now, Sam, I sure hate to do it—but I got to. Stick up your hands, Sam, and do it damn sudden!”

The muzzle of her revolver poked the astounded sheriff in the stomach. For a moment he gazed into her shrewd blue eyes, then slowly elevated his hands.

“Are you crazy, ma’am?” he demanded.

She removed his holstered weapon, then lowered her own and shook her head.

“Nope. I’m heap sane right here and now. Set down and smoke whilst I explain.”