Conversation at the bunkhouse and the chucktent sometimes circled around the young women at the house, but its personality rarely grew pronounced. References to Helen Messiter and the housemaid were usually by way of repartee at each other. For a change had come over the spirit of the Lazy D men, and, though a cheerful profanity still flowed freely when they were alone together, vulgarity was largely banished.
The morning after his conversation with Miss Messiter, McWilliams was washing in the foreman’s room when the triangle beat the call for breakfast, and he heard the cook’s raucous “Come and get it.” There was the usual stampede for the tent, and a minute later Mac flung back the flap and entered. He took the seat at the head of the table, along the benches on both sides of which the punchers were plying busy knives and forks.
“A stack of chips,” ordered the foreman; and the cook’s “Coming up” was scarcely more prompt than the plate of hot cakes he set before the young man.
“Hen fruit, sunny side up,” shouted Reddy, who was further advanced in his meal.
“Tame that fog-horn, son,” advised Wun Hop; but presently he slid three fried eggs from a frying-pan into the plate of the hungry one.
“I want y’u boys to finish flankin’ that bunch of hill calves to-day,” said the foreman, emptying half a jug of syrup over his cakes.
“Redtop, he ain’t got no appetite these days,” grinned Denver, as the gentleman mentioned cleaned up a second loaded plate of ham, eggs and fried potatoes. “I see him studying a Wind River Bible* yesterday. Curious how in the spring a young man’s fancy gits to wandering on house furnishing. Red, he was taking the catalogue alphabetically. Carpets was absorbin’ his attention, chairs on deck, and chandeliers in the hole, as we used to say when we was baseball kids.”
[* A Wind River Bible in the Northwest ranch country is a catalogue of one of the big Chicago department stores that does a large shipping business in the West.]
“Ain’t a word of truth in it,” indignantly denied the assailed, his unfinished nose and chin giving him a pathetic, whipped puppy look. “Sho! I was just looking up saddles. Can’t a fellow buy a new saddle without asking leave of Denver?”
“Cyarpets used to begin with a C in my spelling-book, but saddles got off right foot fust with a S,” suggested Mac amiably.