But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning chair.  In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has dropped in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his breakfast.  He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with deliberation, and started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with something of a swagger.  Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head of the table.  Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached the middle, and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed: 

“The damned razor-back!”

But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated the rest of the table into a pretty pother.

Suppose she should countenance his audacity?  The fair have been known to succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a long siege has failed signally.  What figures they would cut if she did!—­and Simpson, of all men!  A growing tension had crept into the atmosphere of the eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm.  Oh, why hadn’t she been contented to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of coming to this savage place?

“From the look of the yearling’s chin, I think he’ll get all that’s coming to him,” whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the second chair.

“You’re right, pard.  If I’m any good at reading brands, she is as self-protective as the McKinley bill.”

The man Simpson was not a pleasant vis-a-vis.  He wore the same picturesque ruffianliness of apparel as his fellows, but the resemblance stopped there.  He lacked their dusky bloom, their clearness of eye, the suppleness and easy flow of muscle that is the hall-mark of these frontiersmen.  He was fat and squat and had not the rich bronzing of wind, sun, and rain.  His small, black eyes twinkled from his puffy, white face, like raisins in a dough-pudding.

He was ogling Mary amiably when the woman who kept the eating-house brought him his breakfast.  Mrs. Clark was a potent antidote for the prevailing spirit of romance, even in this woman-forsaken country.  A good creature, all limp calico, Roman nose, and sharp elbows, she brought him his breakfast with an ill grace that she had not shown to the others.  The men about the table gave him scant greeting, but the absence of enthusiasm didn’t embarrass Simpson.

He lounged expansively on the table, regarding Miss Carmichael attentively meanwhile; then favored her with the result of his observations, “From the East, I take it.”  And the dumpling face screwed into a smile whose mission was pacific.