ke that."

Jane gasped. "Leeks and lettuce? Me? He doesn't know what he's talking
about! And anyhow, what can you expect of a man like that?"

III

A week later Jane in a white shirt-waist and white apron came down with
her white-covered basket into the glare of the town's white lights. The
night was warm and she wore no hat. Her red hair was swept back from her
forehead with a droop over the ears. She had white skin and strong white
teeth. Her eyes were as gray as the sea on stormy days. Tommy came after
her with a wooden box, which he set on end, and she placed her basket on
it. The principal stores of the small town, the one hotel and the
post-office were connected by a covered walk which formed a sort of
arcade, so that the men lounging against doorways or tip-tilted in
chairs seemed in a sort of gallery from which they surveyed the
Saturday-night crowd which paraded the street.

Jane folded up the cloth which covered her basket and displayed her
wares. "Don't stick round, Tommy," she said. "I shall do better alone."

But as she raised her head and saw the eyes of the men upon her a rich
color surged into her cheeks.

She put out her little sign bravely:

HOME-MADE SANDWICHES--TWENTY CENTS

With a sense of adventure upon them the men flocked down at once. They
bought at first because the wares were offered by a pretty girl. They
came back to buy because never had there been such sandwiches.

Jane had improved upon her first idea. There were not only ham
sandwiches; there were baked beans between brown bread, thin slices of
broiled bacon in hot baking-powder biscuit. Henry Bittinger said to
Atwood Jones afterward: "The food was so good that if she had been as
ugly as sin she'd have got away with it."

"She isn't ugly," said Atwood, and had a fleeting moment of speculation
as to whether Jane with her red hair would fit into his plutocratic
future.

Jane had made fifty sandwiches. She sold them all, and took ten dollars
home with her.

"I shall make a hundred next time," she said to Tommy, whom she picked
up on the way back. "And--it wasn't so dreadful, Tommy."

But that night as she lay in bed looking out toward the mountain,
silver-tipped in the moonlight, she had a shivering sense of the eyes of
some of the men--of Tillotson, who kept the hotel, and of others of his
kind.

O-liver had stayed at home that Saturday night to write a certain weekly
letter. He had stayed at home also because