ent much over twenty miles an hour on the main street,
people might glance at you; and that the real welcome, the only
impression of Reaper that tourists were likely to carry away, was the
welcome in the one restaurant. It was called the Eats Garden. As Claire
and her father entered, they were stifled by a belch of smoke from the
frying pan in the kitchen. The room was blocked by a huge lunch counter;
there was only one table, covered with oil cloth decorated with
venerable spots of dried egg yolk.

The waiter-cook, whose apron was gravy-patterned, with a border and
stomacher of plain gray dirt, grumbled, "Whadyuhwant?"

Claire sufficiently recovered to pick out the type from the fly specks
on the menu, and she ordered a small steak and coffee for her father;
for herself tea, boiled eggs, toast.

"Toast? We ain't got any toast!"

"Well, can't you make it?"

"Oh, I suppose I could----"

When they came, the slices of toast were an inch thick, burnt on one
side and raw on the other. The tea was bitter and the eggs watery. Her
father reported that his steak was high-test rawhide, and his
coffee--well, he wasn't sure just what substitute had been used for
chicory, but he thought it was lukewarm quinine.

Claire raged: "You know, this town really has aspirations. They're
beginning to build such nice little bungalows, and there's a fine clean
bank---- Then they permit this scoundrel to advertise the town among
strangers, influential strangers, in motors, by serving food like this!
I suppose they think that they arrest criminals here, yet this
restaurant man is a thief, to charge real money for food like this----
Yes, and he's a murderer!"

"Oh, come now, dolly!"

"Yes he is, literally. He must in his glorious career have given chronic
indigestion to thousands of people--shortened their lives by years.
That's wholesale murder. If I were the authorities here, I'd be
indulgent to the people who only murder one or two people, but imprison
this cook for life. Really! I mean it!"

"Well, he probably does the best he----"

"He does not! These eggs and this bread were perfectly good, before he
did black magic over them. And did you see the contemptuous look he gave
me when I was so eccentric as to order toast? Oh, Reaper, Reaper, you
desire a modern town, yet I wonder if you know how many thousands of
tourists go from coast to coast, cursing you? If I could only hang that
restaurant man--and the others like him--in a rop