Judith of the Plains | Page 4

life who ride or fall in the tourney of a new country.
At present, "the yearling," drinking her execrable coffee in an agony of
embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have
liked to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for
her. But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her
discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most
difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael's.
With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have
given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly
opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied
the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of seclusion.
As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating
a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could
obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a
chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor
as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the
cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about "Town," as the
case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat
separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of
four chairs.
But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning chair.
In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has dropped
in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his breakfast. He
stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with deliberation, and started
to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with something of a
swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head of the table.
Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached the middle,
and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed:
"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.
He was ogling Mary amiably when the woman who kept the
eating-house brought him his breakfast. Mrs. Clark was a potent
antidote for the prevailing spirit of romance, even in this
woman-forsaken country. A good creature, all limp calico, Roman nose,
and sharp elbows, she brought him his breakfast with an ill grace that
she had not shown to the others. The men about the table gave him
scant greeting, but the absence of enthusiasm didn't embarrass
Simpson.

He lounged expansively on the table, regarding Miss Carmichael
attentively meanwhile; then favored her with the result of his
observations, "From the East, I take it." And the dumpling face screwed
into a smile whose mission was pacific.
Every knife and fork in the room suspended action in anxiety to know
how the "yearling" would take it. Would their chivalry, which strained
at a gnat, be compelled to swallow such a conspicuous camel as the
success of Simpson? With the attitude he had taken towards the girl,
there had crept into the company an imperceptible change; deep-buried
impulses sprang to the surface. If a scoundrel like Simpson was going
to try