flapjacks, gave them to Ben Swift.

Hawks now leaned across the table with a sinuous, beguiling motion, and,
extending his long neck towards the prospector, with the air of a
turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: "Ira, it's a heap risky
puttin' your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the country,
God-a'mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious stones,
seein' gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names your
backyard and the rocks appertainin' thereunto a heap fashionable, and like
as not some sucker gives him good money to float the trash back East."

Mrs. Rodney, whose partisanship in any discussion was analogous to the
position of a hen perching on a fence unable to decide on which side to
flutter, was visibly impressed by Hawks's presentation of the case.
Looking towards her daughter from under the eaves of her sun-bonnet, she
"'lowed she had hearn that Bad Water was hard on the skin, an' that it
warn't much of a place arter all. Folks over thar war mostly half-livers."

Ira, now losing all semblance of policy at being thus grievously put down
by his possible mother-in-law, "reckoned that herdin' sheep over to the
Basin was a heap easier on the skin than livin' in a comf'table house over
to Bad Water"--this as a fling at Hawks, who herded a small bunch of sheep
"over in the Basin."

"Ai-yi," openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; "talk's cheap before--" She
would have considered it indelicate to supply the word "marriage," but by
breaking off her sentence before she came to the pith of it she continued
to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to her audience
that she was too old and experienced to permit any fledgling from her nest
to be caught, for want of a warning, by such obvious ante-matrimonial
chaff as fair promises.

"Laws a massy!" she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw to
free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. "When me an' paw
war keepin' comp'ny, satin warn't good enough for me. He lowed I wuz to
have half creation. Sence we wuz married he 'ain't never found time,
endurin' all these years, to build me a bird-house."

The unbuilt bird-house was the Banquo's ghost at the Rodney board, Mrs.
Rodney hearkening back to it in and out of season. If the family made
merry over a chance windfall of game or fresh vegetables, a prospect of
possible employment for one of the boys, a donation of money from Judith,
Mrs. Ro