“Now,” said Tom, “I’ll cook you a real breakfast.  My compadre, here, can’t drink and he can’t cook.”

“Three breakfasts before ten o’clock?” protested Constance.

But Tom was inexorable.  “Eat when you get a chanct,” he insisted.  “That’s a good rule.”

Barkley drew Ellsworth to one side.  “I can’t figure these people out,” he complained.

Ellsworth chuckled.  “I told you you’d need help, Barkley,” he said.  “They’ve got ways of their own.  You can’t come in here and take that whole town without reckoning with the people that live there.  Now suppose we get Anderson to himself and talk things over with him a little?  We may not have another chance so good.”

Ellsworth beckoned to Dan Anderson, and he readily joined them.  The three walked a little way apart; which left Constance to the tender mercy of Tom Osby.

“That’s all right, ma’am,” said he, when she objected to his cleaning the knives by sticking them into the sand.  “I don’t reckon you do that way back home, but it’s the only way you can get a knife plumb clean.”

“So this is the way men live out here?” mused Constance, half to herself.

“Mostly.  You ought to see him”—­he nodded toward Dan Anderson—­“cook flap-jacks.  The woman who marries him will shore have a happy home.  We’re goin’ to send him to Congress some day, maybe.”

Constance missed the irrelevance of this.  “I wonder,” said she, gently, “how he happened to come out here—­how any one happened to come out here?”

“In his case,” replied Tom, “it was probably because he wanted to get as far away from Washington as he could—­his mileage will amount to more.  This is one of the best places in America, ma’am, for a man to go to Congress from.”  Constance smiled, though the answer did not satisfy her.

“There are folks, ma’am,” Tom Osby continued, “that says that every feller come out here because of a girl somewheres.  They allow that a woman sent most of us out here.  For me, it was my fifth wife, or my fourth, I don’t remember which.  She never did treat me right, and her eyes didn’t track.  Yes, I’ll bet, ma’am, without knowing anything about it, there was a girl back somewhere in Dan Anderson’s early ree-cords, though whether it was his third or fourth wife, I don’t know.  We don’t ask no questions about such things out here.”

He went on rubbing sand around in the bottom of the frying-pan, but none the less caught, with side-long glance, the flush upon the brown cheek visible beneath its veil.

“I’m mighty glad to see you this mornin’, ma’am,” he went on; “I am, for a fact.  It more’n pays me—­it more’n pays him—­” and he nodded again toward Dan Anderson, “for our trip down here.  We wasn’t expectin’ to meet you.”

“How did you happen to come?” asked Constance, feeling as she did so that she was guilty of treachery.