"The damned razor-back!"

But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair
opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated the
rest of the table into a pretty pother.

Suppose she should countenance his audacity? The fair have been known to
succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a long
siege has failed signally. What figures they would cut if she did!—and
Simpson, of all men! A growing tension had crept into the atmosphere of
the eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary,
sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that
she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn’t she been contented
to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes
of her aunts, instead of coming to this savage place?

"From the look of the yearling’s chin, I think he’ll get all that’s coming
to him," whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the second chair.

"You’re right, pard. If I’m any good at reading brands, she is as
self-protective as the McKinley bill."

The man Simpson was not a pleasant vis-à-vis. He wore the same picturesque
ruffianliness of apparel as his fellows, but the resemblance stopped
there. He lacked their dusky bloom, their clearness of eye, the suppleness
and easy flow of muscle that is the hall-mark of these frontiersmen. He
was fat and squat and had not the rich bronzing of wind, sun, and rain.
His small, black eyes twinkled from his puffy, white face, like raisins in
a dough-pudding.