t from the manner in which he glanced up and down the table
and listened to snatches of talk on either side of him he had the
appearance of one to whom it was all new, and who was seeing it for the
first time.

There was a jolly group at one end of the long table, and they wished
to emphasize the fact by laughing a little more hysterically at their
remarks than the humor of those witticisms seemed to justify. A
daughter-in-law of Mrs. Porter was their leader in this, and at one
point she stopped in the middle of a story and waving her hand at the
double row of faces turned in her direction, which had been attracted
by the loudness of her voice, cried, gayly, "Don't listen. This is for
private circulation. It is not a jeune-fille story." The debutantes
at the table continued talking again in steady, even tones, as though
they had not heard the remark or the first of the story, and the men
next to them appeared equally unconscious. But the cowboy, Miss
Langham noted out of the corner of her eye, after a look of polite
surprise, beamed with amusement and continued to stare up and down the
table as though he had discovered a new trait in a peculiar and
interesting animal. For some reason, she could not tell why, she felt
annoyed with herself and with her friends, and resented the attitude
which the new-comer assumed toward them.

"Mrs. Porter tells me that you know her son George?" she said. He did
not answer her at once, but bowed his head in assent, with a look of
interrogation, as though, so it seemed to her, he had expected her,
when she did speak, to say something less conventional.

"Yes," he replied, after a pause, "he joined us at Ayutla. It was the
terminus of the Jalisco and Mexican Railroad then. He came out over
the road and went in from there with an outfit after mountain lions. I
believe he had very good sport."

"That is a very wonderful road, I am told," said King, bending forward
and introducing himself into the conversation with a nod of the head
toward Clay; "quite a remarkable feat of engineering."

"It will open up the country, I believe," assented the other,
indifferently.

"I know something of it," continued King, "because I met the men who
were putting it through at Pariqua, when we touched there in the yacht.
They shipped most of their plant to that port, and we saw a good deal
of them. They were a very jolly lot, and they gave me a most
interesting account of their work and its dif