turn a mild blue eye toward the
speaker and resume his whittling. He smiled faintly, with a sort of
apology, as the other went on.

"I'll say more'n that, Sim. It's the blamedest, dirtiest hole in the
whole state of Montany--yes, or in the whole wide world. Lookit!"

He swept a hand around, indicating the interior of the single-room log
cabin in which they sat.

"Well," commented Sim Gage after a time, taking a meditative but wholly
unagitated tobacco shot at the cook stove, "I ain't saying she is and I
ain't saying she ain't. But I never did say I was a perfessional
housekeeper, did I now?"

"Well, some folks has more sense of what's right, anyways," grumbled
Wid Gardner, shifting his position on one of the two insecure cracker
boxes which made the only chairs, and resting an elbow on the oil cloth
table cover, where stood a few broken dishes, showing no signs of any
ablution in all their hopeless lives. "My own self, I'm a bachelor
man, too--been batching for twenty years, one place and another--but by
God! Sim, this here is the human limit. Look at that bed."

He kicked a foot toward a heap of dirty fabrics which lay upon the
floor, a bed which might once have been devised for a man, but long
since had fallen below that rank. It had a breadth of dirty canvas
thrown across it, from under which the occupant had crawled out.
Beneath might be seen the edges of two or three worn and dirty cotton
quilts and a pair of blankets of like dinginess. Below this lay a worn
elk hide, and under all a lower-breadth of the over-lapping canvas. It
was such a bed as primarily a cow-puncher might have had, but fallen
into such condition that no cow camp would have tolerated it.

Sim Gage looked at the heap of bedding for a time gravely and
carefully, as though trying to find some reason for his friend's
dissatisfaction. His mouth began to work as it always did when he was
engaged in some severe mental problem, but he frowned apologetically
once more as he spoke.

"Well, Wid, I know, I know. It ain't maybe just the thing to sleep on
the floor all the time, noways. You see, I got a bunk frame made for
her over there, and it's all tight and strong--it was there when I took
this cabin over from the Swede. But I ain't never just got around to
moving my bed offen the floor onto the bedstead. I may do it some day.
Fact is, I was just a-going to do it anyways."

"Just a-going to--like hell you was! You been a-going to