“Don’t you aim to set down, Uncle Bill?” she asked kindly as the rest filed in.
“Thanks, no, I et late and quite hearty, an’ I see the Try-bune’s come.”
“I should think you’d want to eat every chance you got after all you went through out hunting.”
“It’s that, I reckon, what’s took my appetite,” the old man answered soberly, as he produced his steel-rimmed spectacles and started to read what the Beaver Creek postmistress had left him of his newspaper.
Inside, Mr. Dill seated himself at the end of the long table which a placard braced against the castor proclaimed as sacred to the “transient.” A white tablecloth served as a kind of dead-line over which the most audacious regular dared not reach for special delicacies when Ma Snow hovered in the vicinity.
“Let me he’p yoah plate to some Oregon-grape jell,” Ma Snow was urging in her honied North Carolina accent, when, by that mysterious sixth sense which she seemed to possess, or the eye which it was believed she concealed by the arrangement of her back hair, she became suddenly aware of the condition of Mr. Lannigan’s hands.
She whirled upon him like a catamount and her weak blue eyes watered in a way they had when she was about to show the hardness of a Lucretia Borgia. Her voice, too, that quivered as though on the verge of tears, had a quality in it which sent shivers up and down the spines of those who were familiar with it.
“Lannigan, what did I tell you?”
It was obvious enough that Lannigan knew what she had told him for he immediately jerked his hands off the oilcloth, and hid them under the table.