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.