"Can I help?"
She had been swabbing down the counter as she talked, accentuating every sentence with an extra twist of her arm, the wash-cloth held tight between her fingers. She stopped now and looked me squarely in the face.
"Help! What are you good for?" There was a tone of contempt in her voice.
"Well, I'm handy passing plates and cutting bread and pie. I've nothing to do till the train comes along. Try me a while."
"You don't look like no waiter."
"But I am. I've been waiting on people all my life." I had crawled under the counter now and was standing beside her. "Where will you have this?" and I picked up from a side table a dish of apples and oranges caged in a wire screen. I knew I was lost if I hesitated.
"Lay 'em here," she answered without a word of protest. I was not surprised. The big and boundless West has no place for men ashamed to work with their hands. Only the week before, in Colorado Springs, I had dined at a house where the second son of a noble lord had delivered the family milk that same morning, he being the guest of honor. And then—I was hungry.
The woman watched me put the finishing touches on the dish of fruit, and said in an altered tone, as if her misgivings had been satisfied:
"Now, fill that bucket with water, will ye? The sink's behind ye. I'll start the coffee. And here!" and she handed me a key—"after ye fetch the water, unlock the refrigerator and bring me that ham and them baked beans."
Before the "ladies" had arrived—half an hour, in fact, before one of them had put in an appearance—I was seated at a small table covered with a clean cloth (I had set the table) with half a ham, a whole loaf of bread, a pitcher of milk that had been left outside in the snow and was full of lovely ice crystals, a smoking cup of coffee and a smoking pile of griddle cakes which the woman had compounded from the contents of two paper packages, and which she herself had cooked on a gas griddle—and very good cakes they were: total cost, as per schedule, fifty cents.