DNA, Countess of Yetholme, spending the night in the Wigwam, a little hotel in Blackfoot supported by the English set, was wakened by a low, persistent knocking on her bedroom door; it was Parrott, her maid, clad in a kimono and very untidy about the head.
“There's a lady asking for you, my lady!” exclaimed Parrott, breathless with amazement.
“What time is it?” murmured the Countess, none too pleasantly; for she was of a comfortable habit and resented excitement in the middle of the night.
“Three o'clock, my lady,” said Parrott impressively.
“Good patience!” cried the Countess plaintively. “Who is it?”
“Never saw her before. Very well dressed and quiet-mannered, my lady. Has a person with her I think is her maid.”
“What on earth does she want?”
“Didn't tell me, my lady. Says she, 'Please tell the Countess I must see her for a moment on a matter of the most urgent importance—something that cannot wait until morning.'”
“Well, show her into my sitting-room and come back and help me,” said the Countess, curiosity getting the better of her love of ease.
With an ample jointure and no responsibilities the Countess Edna found life as a dowager of forty-two very agreeable. After twenty years of experience as the dutiful wife of a trying peer and the anxious mother of two dangerous girls, she had by the death of the former and the marriages of the latter lately found herself free to follow her own sweet will; and like other suddenly liberated persons, had immediately experienced the desire to see life. To the Countess “seeing life” meant a trip to Canada to visit her husband's brother on his great horse ranch west of the town of Blackfoot. Here, to tell the truth, she had been very much disappointed; there was not a single bucking bronco among the honorable Alfred Anway's stock—only blooded hackneys such as she saw every day in the Park at home; and the cowboys she had expected to see were scarcely to be distinguished from English grooms. As for her Canadian sister-in-law, instead of the breezy, unconventional Westerner she longed to meet, she found an exaggerated great lady whose airs got on the nerves of the honest Lady Edna. The other women of the district were no more amusing; they all copied her own manner and strove to entertain her with painful little imitations of the very functions she had fled from England to escape for a time.
Lady Edna consoled herself with three graceless youths, in whom she fancied she perceived something genuinely Western, to wit: her nephew, Lord Algernon Craucester, Algy's cousin, Baron Fabien de Maurillac, half English, half French, and the honorable Bill Trefusis, Algy's “partner.” Until the arrival of the Countess “the three gamboliers,” as they called themselves, had been outcasts from polite English society around Blackfoot. Between remittances Algy and Bill eked out a mysterious existence in a deplorable shack up Nose Creek way, while Fabien, who was of a more independent character, was for the time being driving a milk wagon about town with true aristocratic carelessness. On quarter days they joined forces, cashed their drafts and for a few days cut a wide swath in town, which more often than not ended in the Blackfoot lock-up. But Lady Edna knew nothing about this. She had a soft spot in her heart for boys, no doubt because she had longed in vain to have one of her own, so her blond, curly-headed nephew had no difficulty whatever in worming himself into her affections and he had promptly introduced his two friends.
Induced by Lady Edna's glowing letters home, or for other reasons, her brother, the old Marquis of Ommaney, Algy's father, had suddenly decided on a flying trip through western Canada and California, and he was to stop off at Blackfoot early the next morning. Algy, like many another remittance man, was, for his misdeeds, an exile from home, and the Countess was bent on effecting a reconciliation between father and son; hence her presence at the Wigwam. The transcontinental train, as everyone knows, reaches Blackfoot at half-past four in the morning—when it is on time; it had been arranged that the boys were to meet the Marquis at the train while the Countess was to have Algy and his father to breakfast with her.