I'm just about
starved, if you want to know. And there ain't any potatoes."

"Bread and butter is fine when you're hungry," Ford suggested, and
spread a slice for Buddy, somewhat inattentively, because he was also
keeping an eye upon the kitchen door, where he had caught a fleeting
glimpse of Josephine looking in at him.

"You're putting the butter all in one place," Buddy criticised, with his
usual frankness. "I guess you're drunk, all right. If you're too drunk
to spread butter, let me do it."

"What makes you think I'm drunk?" Ford questioned, lowering his voice
because of the person he suspected was in the kitchen.

"Mamma and Jo was quarreling about it; that's why. And my own mamma
cried, and shut the door, and wouldn't let me go in. And Jo pretty near
cried too, all right. I guess she did, only not when any one was
looking. Her eyes are awful red, anyway." Buddy took great, ravenous
bites of the bread and butter and eyed Ford unwinkingly.

"What's disslepointed?" he demanded abruptly, after he had given himself
a white mustache with his glass of milk.

"Why do you want to know?"

"That's what my own mamma is, and that's what Jo is. Only my own mamma
is it about you, and Jo's it about mamma. Say, did you lick Dick? Jo
told my own mamma she wisht you'd killed him. Jo's awful mad to-day. I
guess she's mad at Dick, because he ain't very much of a fighter. Did
you lick him easy? Did you paste him one in the jaw?"

Josephine entered then with Ford's belated tea. Her eyelids were pink,
as Buddy had told him, and she did not look at him while she filled his
cup.

"Kate has a sick headache," she explained primly, "and I did the best I
could with lunch. I hope it's--"

"It is," Ford interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is fine and dandy."

"You didn't cook any potatoes!" Buddy charged mercilessly. "And Ford's
too drunk to put the butter on right. I'm going to tell my dad that next
time he goes to Oregon I'm going along. This outfit will sure go to the
devil if he stays much longer!"

"Where did you hear that, Bud?" Josephine asked, still carefully
avoiding a glance at Ford.

"Well, Dick said it would go to the devil. I guess," he added on his own
account, with an eloquent look at the table, "it's on the trail right
now."

Ford looked at Josephine, opened his lips to say that it might still be
headed off, and decided not to speak. There was a stubborn streak in
Ford Campbell. She had said some bitter thing