He turned to the register and ran his finger down the page; then looked around.
"You skin up to Room No. 19, the one that Beatty lad hired for 'Mr. and Mrs. F. S. Beatty'. I'll 'see that ye ain't disturbed, while ye get y'r sleep out; then we can talk over what ye're a-goin to do. Now, Bob Markey," the old man glanced at the clock, "I'm goin' to get to hell out 'o this, like you said, an' meet that south train. And I'll be in plenty o' time, too."
With this, old Jim Hogle, taking his rawhide with him, passed off across the rotunda—the picture of health, from his great shoulders to the cat-like feet that moved as though yet in their pioneer moccasins—and made the ceiling ring with the mighty bass of his "last ca-a-all"—this being on the present morning a purely perfunctory office, as the rotunda of the Imperial Hotel was empty. Daisy—glad enough to do it, too, for her limbs were tottering under her with drowsiness—took the key Markey sullenly flung down on the counter, and went up to bed in Room No. 19.
CHAPTER IV. A "Steer".
It might have been about four o'clock in the afternoon when she awoke. Room No. 19 looked westward—not over green swells of grass and grazing cattle, and a wind swinging as a censer in the sky-temple, but over a hot gravelled roof, parapetted with brick and crossed by three radial clotheslines, upon which human garments jiggled grotesquely, like scissored paper men. The only jig-makers extant, these, on that busy midweek afternoon.
At one end of this low one-story level of roof, a brick rear-wall rose, with a row of doors that opened out upon those merry clothes-lines. Through one of these doors, as Daisy looked, came a young girl of about her own age. Plainly soon to become a mother, the girl's eyes had that mild, pondering look characteristic of her condition. She dragged over the gravel a basket of clothes; and, when she had reached an unoccupied part of one of the clotheslines, commenced to pin the washed things up—a mechanic's moleskin shirt, a cheap, print house-dress, a limp, lacy blouse, a little frilled dust-cap, and other little sartorial coquetries that told their tale of a marriage less than a year old.
Daisy was taking her first look at "light housekeeping"; and, as she was new from the country, with all her distaste of fields and cows and "chores" uppermost, this back-roof prospect held her, as the new always holds. To her, it was not sordid, but sunny and cosy, with the wonderful city-sounds rising all about. She could almost have leaped across to the brick parapet, which was just below the level of her window; and for one gay adventurous moment, she came nearly doing it. She wanted to look in those doors; to see how people lived, in the city; to talk to the young urban housewife. She wanted to explore endlessly, to feed her boundless and exuberant youth's appetite of the eye.
A knock came at the door. Daisy felt a little anxious as she thought of old Jim Hogle. He had served her turn—secured her purse for her from Markey, toward whom she bore no grudge but felt instead a mischievous desire to "tame down" into a wooer—and she did not want any meddling, old, self-appointed foster-father handicapping her movements here in town. She must let the old man, who reminded her distastefully of the farm, know, once and for all, that her plans were "none of his business". Perhaps, though, he would not be put aside so easily. With this last thought in her mind, it was a very cold and hostile face that Daisy presented, as she unlocked the door and opened it.