the hardiest appetite. One man summed up the steak with, "You got to work
your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain’t fair to the next meal."

His neighbor heaved a sigh. "This here formation, whatever it be"—and he
turned the meat over for better inspection—"do shore remind me of an
indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv’ my sister when we
was kids. That doll sort of challenged me, settin’ round oncapable o’
bein’ destroyed, and one day I ups an’ has a chaw at her. She war
ondestructible, all right; ’fore that I concluded my speriments I had left
a couple o’ teeth in her."

"Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces," and the first
man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.

Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual scraping of chairs across the
gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken; and
while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any further
invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she could not
persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of the enemy,
even in the interest of the diary she had kept so conscientiously for the
past three days; which was something of a loss to the diary, as those
untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at. Reckless they were in
many instances, and sometimes the lines of hardship were cruelly writ
across young faces that had not yet lost the down of adolescence, but
there were humor and endurance and the courage that knows how to make a
crony of death and get right good sport from the comradeship. Their faults
were the faults of lusty, red-blooded youth, and their virtues the
open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy of those uncertain tilters at
life who ride or fall in the tourney of a new country.