Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a discouraged march.  A plague of flies was on everything, and the food was a threat to the hardiest appetite.  One man summed up the steak with, “You got to work your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain’t fair to the next meal.”

His neighbor heaved a sigh.  “This here formation, whatever it be”—­and he turned the meat over for better inspection—­“do shore remind me of an indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv’ my sister when we was kids.  That doll sort of challenged me, settin’ round oncapable o’ bein’ destroyed, and one day I ups an’ has a chaw at her.  She war ondestructible, all right; ’fore that I concluded my speriments I had left a couple o’ teeth in her.”

“Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces,” and the first man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.

Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual scraping of chairs across the gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken; and while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any further invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she could not persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of the enemy, even in the interest of the diary she had kept so conscientiously for the past three days; which was something of a loss to the diary, as those untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at.  Reckless they were in many instances, and sometimes the lines of hardship were cruelly writ across young faces that had not yet lost the down of adolescence, but there were humor and endurance and the courage that knows how to make a crony of death and get right good sport from the comradeship.  Their faults were the faults of lusty, red-blooded youth, and their virtues the open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy of those uncertain tilters at life who ride or fall in the tourney of a new country.

At present, “the yearling,” drinking her execrable coffee in an agony of embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds.  They would have liked to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her.  But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael’s.  With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of seclusion.

As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat.  And the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about “Town,” as the case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of four chairs.