“Any ole snipe shooter could say dat!” retorted Lardo the Cook. “I done it meself—easy. Youse’re a disappointment on dat deal, Jack. Well, I guess youse’ve contrackted an eyeful, now. I didn’t tell youse to make a telescope outa yerself. Find me dose drip pans I was huntin’, and den fasten yerself to de crank o’ dat meat grinder. We’ll shoot ’em hash fer dinner, ketch-as-ketch-can, an’ if dey don’t like it dey c’n tell Lardo de Cook. And dat’s sudden deat’! I killed more gaycats for kickin’ about hash dan fer any udder reason, Jack.”
Falcon the Flunky returned to his work, but the girl that he had seen had aroused his interest. She was as pretty as the little desert flowers he had enjoyed so much on the trip across the wastes. She looked like a wild-West moving picture actress as she sat there in her elaborate saddle, chapped and booted and spurred, talking to Mangan, except that—well, Falcon the Flunky did not particularly care for actresses. The girlish freshness of her appealed to him most.
He hunted for and found the dripping pans, made sure that the cold meat they had brought along had not spoiled, and began grinding it into one of the pans for hash. It requires a great deal of grinding to make hash for a construction camp, and Falcon the Flunky was still engaged in turning the crank three quarters of an hour later when, at the cook-tent door, he heard Mangan say:
“And this is the cook tent, Miss Canby. Go right in. Lardo is a wild man, but we’ll watch him while you’re around.”
The flaps of the tent were pulled aside to frame a picture of a girl in chaps and boots and Stetson. Then said the picture, to whoever was outside at her back:
“Oh, I want to see the flunky first,” said the girl. “I’ve never seen a flunky.”
She was looking directly at the patient grinder of cooked beef. And in that instant the grinder wished fervently that he was anything but a flunky.
Now a boy with wide eyes and a blistered snub nose joined the picture. It moved forward a step or two, and Hunter Mangan became a part of its composition. He pointed laughingly at the man who ground meat.
“That is a flunky,” he said.
There came a devilish twinkle into the girl’s hazel eyes. With quick, rustling strides she left the doorway and whirled her spur rowels straight toward the object under discussion. She held out a strong hand, browned to the color of her chestnut hair by desert winds.