also, walking for the sake of ventilation from
a sleeping-car toward a bath, when the language of Colonel Cyrus Jones
came out to me. The actual colonel I had never seen before. He stood
at the rear of his palace in gray flowery mustaches and a Confederate
uniform, telling the wishes of his guests to the cook through a hole.
You always bought meal tickets at once, else you became unwelcome.
Guests here had foibles at times, and a rapid exit was too easy.
Therefore I bought a ticket. It was spring and summer since I had heard
anything like the colonel. The Missouri had not yet flowed into New York
dialect freely, and his vocabulary met me like the breeze of the plains.
So I went in to be fanned by it, and there sat the Virginian at a table,
alone.

His greeting was up to the code of indifference proper on the plains;
but he presently remarked, "I'm right glad to see somebody," which was a
good deal to say. "Them that comes hyeh," he observed next, "don't eat.
They feed." And he considered the guests with a sombre attention.
"D' yu' reckon they find joyful digestion in this swallo'-an'-get-out
trough?"

"What are you doing here, then?" said I.

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what
you have." And he took the bill-of-fare. I began to know that he had
something on his mind, so I did not trouble him further.

Meanwhile he sat studying the bill-of-fare.

"Ever heard o' them?" he inquired, shoving me the spotted document.

Most improbable dishes were there,--salmis, canapes, supremes,--all
perfectly spelt and absolutely transparent. It was the old trick of
copying some metropolitan menu to catch travellers of the third and last
dimension of innocence; and whenever this is done the food is of the
third and last dimension of awfulness, which the cow-puncher knew as
well as anybody.

"So they keep that up here still," I said.

"But what about them?" he repeated. His finger was at a special item,
FROGS' LEGS A LA DELMONICO. "Are they true anywheres?" he asked And I
told him, certainly. I also explained to him about Delmonico of New York
and about Augustin of Philadelphia.

"There's not a little bit o' use in lyin' to me this mawnin'," he said,
with his engaging smile. "I ain't goin' to awdeh anything's laigs."

"Well, I'll see how he gets out of it," I said, remembering the odd
Texas legend. (The traveller read the bill-of-fare, you know, and called
for a vol-au-vent. And the proprietor