In the mean time, "Town" came yawning to breakfast. It was not so prankish
as it had been the night before, when it accepted the sheepman’s
broad-gauge hospitality and made merry till the sun winked from behind the
mountains. It made its way to the low, shedlike eating-house with a
pre-breakfast solemnity bordering on sulkiness. Not a petticoat was in
sight to offset the spurs and sombreros that filed into breakfast from
every point in the compass, prepared to eat primitively, joke broadly, and
quarrel speedily if that sensitive and often inconsistent something they
called honor should be brushed however lightly.

But the eternal feminine was within, and, discovering it, the temper of
"Town" was changed; it ate self-consciously, made jokes meet for the ears
of ladies, and was more interested in the girl in the sailor-hat than it
was in remembering old feuds or laying the foundations of new.

In its interior aspect, the eating-house conveyed no subtle invitation to
eat, drink, and be merry. On the contrary, its mission seemed to be that
of confounding appetite at every turn. A long, shedlike room it was, with
walls of unpainted pine, still sweating from the axe. Festoons of
scalloped paper, in conflicting shades, hung from the ceiling, a menace to
the taller of the guests. On the rough walls some one, either prompted by
a latent spirit of æstheticism or with an idea of abetting the town
towards merrymaking—an encouragement it hardly required—had tacked posters
of shows, mainly representing the tank-and-sawmill school of drama.

Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered
table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup
bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a discouraged
march. A plague of flies was on everything, and the food was a threat to