Buddy gazed upon the sprinkle of dishes with undisguised dissatisfaction.  “There ain’t any potatoes,” he announced gloomily.  “My own mamma always cooks potatoes.  Josephine’s the limit!  I been working to-day.  I almost dug out a badger, over by the bluff.  I got where I could hear him scratching to get away, and then it was all rocks, so I couldn’t dig any more.  Gee, it was hard digging!  And I’m just about starved, if you want to know.  And there ain’t any potatoes.”

“Bread and butter is fine when you’re hungry,” Ford suggested, and spread a slice for Buddy, somewhat inattentively, because he was also keeping an eye upon the kitchen door, where he had caught a fleeting glimpse of Josephine looking in at him.

“You’re putting the butter all in one place,” Buddy criticised, with his usual frankness.  “I guess you’re drunk, all right.  If you’re too drunk to spread butter, let me do it.”

“What makes you think I’m drunk?” Ford questioned, lowering his voice because of the person he suspected was in the kitchen.

“Mamma and Jo was quarreling about it; that’s why.  And my own mamma cried, and shut the door, and wouldn’t let me go in.  And Jo pretty near cried too, all right.  I guess she did, only not when any one was looking.  Her eyes are awful red, anyway.”  Buddy took great, ravenous bites of the bread and butter and eyed Ford unwinkingly.

“What’s disslepointed?” he demanded abruptly, after he had given himself a white mustache with his glass of milk.

“Why do you want to know?”

“That’s what my own mamma is, and that’s what Jo is.  Only my own mamma is it about you, and Jo’s it about mamma.  Say, did you lick Dick?  Jo told my own mamma she wisht you’d killed him.  Jo’s awful mad to-day.  I guess she’s mad at Dick, because he ain’t very much of a fighter.  Did you lick him easy?  Did you paste him one in the jaw?”

Josephine entered then with Ford’s belated tea.  Her eyelids were pink, as Buddy had told him, and she did not look at him while she filled his cup.

“Kate has a sick headache,” she explained primly, “and I did the best I could with lunch.  I hope it’s—­”

“It is,” Ford interrupted reassuringly.  “Everything is fine and dandy.”

“You didn’t cook any potatoes!” Buddy charged mercilessly.  “And Ford’s too drunk to put the butter on right.  I’m going to tell my dad that next time he goes to Oregon I’m going along.  This outfit will sure go to the devil if he stays much longer!”

“Where did you hear that, Bud?” Josephine asked, still carefully avoiding a glance at Ford.

“Well, Dick said it would go to the devil.  I guess,” he added on his own account, with an eloquent look at the table, “it’s on the trail right now.”