excuse me whilst I go and pound steak and dish up
dinner and wait on the table. That's the trouble with running a tavern
up here in the woods. I can't keep help of the girl kind. They either
get homesick or get married."

There was an ominous crash in the dining room.

Brophy swore roundly and extricated his rotund haunches from the arms of
his chair. "There goes Dirty-Shirt Sam! I have to double him as hostler
and waiter. He'd smash the feed pails in the stable if they wasn't
galvanized iron."

He pounded with heavy gait across the office and flung open the
dining-room door, disclosing a lop-sided youth who was listlessly
kicking broken dishes into a pile.

"You're fourteen dollars behind your wages, already, with dishes you've
dropped and smashed," shouted Brophy. "I'd give a thousand dollars for
the right kind of a girl to stay here and wait on tables if she wouldn't
get married or homesick. I'll make it a standing offer." He cuffed the
youth in a circle around the heap of broken crockery and went on his way
to the kitchen.

Latisan smoked and reflected on the nature of Echford Flagg as Brophy
had exposed it from the family standpoint.

Then he looked at the sullen youth who was sweeping up the fragments of
the dishes. The whimsical notion occurred to Ward that he might post
Brophy on the advantages of a cafeteria plan of operating his hostelry.
But he had by these thoughts summoned the memory of one certain
cafeteria, and of a handsome girl who sat across from him and who had so
suddenly been swallowed up in the vortex of the city throngs--gone
forever--only a memory that troubled him so much and so often that he
was glad when his own Tomah men appeared to him, asking for commands and
taking his mind off a constantly nagging regret.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The set-off of the Flagg expedition in the gray of early dawn had an
element of picaresque adventure about it.

Latisan was making an estimate of his crew while he mixed with the men,
checking them up, as they assembled again in front of the tavern of
Adonia. Old Cap'n Blackbeard would have cheerfully certified to the
eminent fitness of many of them for conscienceless deeds of derring-do.
The nature of Flagg's wide-flung summons and his provocative method of
selection must needs bring into one band most of the toughest nuts of
the region, Latisan reflected, and he had brought no milk-and-water
chaps from the Tomah. He had come prepared for what was to f