ust have become painful for him to remember, since I
could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine.
But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.

Such being the case, I was more excited than I'd have been willing to
admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since
taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of
people, the people who out here are called "good leather," would
remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may
have been merely ranchers, but I didn't want Peter, whatever his
morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire
by rubbing sticks together.

Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as
his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a
charry mass, the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie had painted
himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I
showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to
remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my
complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of
Whinnie's boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow
soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner
with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.

Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier
through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and
uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about
mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why
he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and
American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of
hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to
understand 'em, and how the wheat I'd manufactured my home-made bread
out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the
alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the
gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have
a specially designed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then he
played "Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker's man," with Dinkie, who took to
him at once, and when I came back from getting the extra cot ready in
the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man's back,
circling the dinner-table and shouting "Gid-dap, 'ossie, gid-dap!" as
h