Saul Chadron was at breakfast next morning when Maggie the cook appeared in the dining-room and announced a visitor for the señor boss. Maggie’s eyes were bulging, and she did a great deal of pantomime with her shapely shoulders to express her combined fright, disgust, and indignation.
Chadron looked up from his ham and eggs, with a considerable portion of the eggs on the blade of his knife, handle-down in one fist, his fork standing like a lightning rod in the other, and asked her who the man was and what he wanted at that hour of the day. Chadron was eating by lamplight, and alone, according to his thrifty custom of slipping up on the day before it was awake, as if in the hope of surprising it at a vast disadvantage to itself, after his way of handling men and things.
“Es un extranjero,” replied Maggie, forgetting her English in her excitement.
“Talk white man, you old sow!” Chadron growled.
“He ees a es-trenger, I do not knowed to heem.”
“Tell him to go to the barn and wait, I’ll be out there in a minute.”
“He will not a-goed. I told to heem—whee!” Maggie clamped her hands to her back as if somebody 103 had caught her in a ticklish spot, as she squealed, and jumped into the room where the grand duke of the cattlemen’s nobility was taking his refreshment.
Chadron had returned to his meal after ordering her to send his visitor to the barn. He was swabbing his knife in the fold of a pancake when Maggie made that frightful, shivering exclamation and jumped aside out of the door. Now he looked up to reprove her, and met the smoky eyes of Mark Thorn peering in from the kitchen.
“What’re you doin’ around here, you old—come in—shut that door! Git him some breakfast,” he ordered, turning to Maggie.
Maggie hung back a moment, until Thorn had come into the room, then she shot into the kitchen like a cat through a fence, and slammed the door behind her.