hing with as perfect an
appreciation of its value as an auctioneer.

Through the dining-room door which opened into the kitchen, he could see
the kitchen range--a big one--the largest made for private houses. Smith
liked that. He liked things on a big scale. Besides, it denoted
generosity, and he had come to regard a woman's kitchen as an index to her
character. He distinctly approved of the big meat-platter upon which the
Chinese cook was piling steak. He eyed the mongrel dog lying at the Indian
woman's feet, and noted that its sides were distended with food. He was
prejudiced against, suspicious of, a woman who kept lean dogs.

In the same impersonal way in which he eyed her belongings, he looked at
the woman who owned it all. She was far too stout to please his taste, but
he liked her square shoulders and the thickness of them; also her hair,
which was long for an Indian woman's. She was too short in the body. He
wondered if she rode. He had a peculiar aversion for women short in the
body who rode on horseback. This woman could love--all Indian women can do
that, as Smith well knew--love to the end, faithfully, like dogs.

In the general analysis of his surroundings, Smith looked at Tubbs, openly
sneering as he eyed him. He was like a sheep-dog that never had been
trained. And McArthur? Innocent as a yearling calf, and honest as some
sky-pilots.

"Glub's piled!" yelled the cook from the kitchen door. "Come an' git it."

Tubbs all but fell off his chair.

At the back door the cook hammered on a huge iron triangle with a poker,
in response to which sound a motley half-dozen men filed from a nearby
bunk-house at a gait very nearly resembling a trot.

The long dining-table was covered with a red table-cloth, and at each end
piles of bread and fried steak rose like monuments. At each place there
was a platter, and beside it a steel knife, a fork, and a tin spoon.

The bunk-house crowd wasted no time in ceremony. Poising their forks above
the meat-platter in a candid search for the most desirable piece, they
alternately stabbed chunks of steak and bread.

Their platters once loaded with a generous sample of all the food in
sight, they fell upon it with unconcealed relish. Eating, McArthur
observed, was a business; there was no time for the amenities of social
intercourse until the first pangs of hunger were appeased. The Chinese
cook, too, interested him as he watched him shuffling over the hewn plank
floor in his