He led the way between the long tables to the front entrance, and she passed out into the morning sunlight.
“Let’s sit down on the ground here by the door,” she suggested.
“I’ll get a chair——”
“No, I prefer sitting on the ground. I sit in chairs only at mealtime.”
Accordingly she sat herself down in the desert sand, and The Falcon sat beside her. The commissary tent and the stable tent were in plain view, both fronting them. At the door of the commissary stood Hunter Mangan and Mart, the latter pretending that he was enjoying the big cigar that mated the contractor’s and looking very important indeed. Mangan looked toward the dining tent, and then suddenly turned his eyes elsewhere.
“Look at that kid brother of mine smoking that big cigar!” Manzanita said with a laugh. “If Pa Squawtooth should see that! I ought to tell on him, but I never do. That boy’s a great care to me.” She sighed pensively. “Well, now, Mr. Falcon the Flunky, what is the royal family?”
The Falcon was watching her closely. While she scooped up sand and allowed it to trickle through her brown fingers, and seemed to be idly intent on it, she now and then shot a quick glance from under her long chestnut lashes toward the commissary. The flunky was nonplused. Quite apparently she had been little interested in the culinary department. That she had made him come straight through to where she could see Mangan and her brother was as evident. What had she in mind? Not a sudden interest in Falcon the Flunky and the mild mystery suggested—of that he was disappointedly certain. It piqued him a trifle. Somehow he found that he wanted her to be interested in him. How old was she—sixteen or twenty-two or three? The long heavy braids of glimmering chestnut hair said “sixteen.” Her developed womanly figure, for all its strength and litheness, proclaimed that she was in her twenties.
“Well?”
“I beg your pardon. Why, the royal family of a construction camp consists of the white-collar brigade—men who don’t work with their hands to any appreciable degree—together with the women of the camp, if there are any about. The contractors and their families, the bosses, the bookkeepers, timekeepers, commissary men, and sometimes an engineer’s party, if one happens to be boarding with a contractor. In most camps these eat at a separate table, and in some cases in a separate dining tent—smaller. That’s the royal family.”
“Snobs, eh?”