At present, “the yearling,” drinking her execrable coffee in an agony of embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have liked to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her. But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael’s. With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of seclusion. As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about “Town,” as the case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of four chairs. But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning chair. In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has dropped in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his breakfast. He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with deliberation, and started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with something of a swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head of the table. Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached the middle, and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed: “The damned razor-back!” But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated the rest of the table into a pretty pother. Suppose she should countenance his audacity? The fair have been known to succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a long siege has failed signally. What figures they would cut if she did!—and Simpson, of all men! A growing tension had crept into the atmosphere of the eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn’t she been contented to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of coming to this savage place? “From the look of the yearling’s chin, I think he’ll get all that’s coming to him,” whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the second chair. “You’re right, pard. If I’m any good at reading brands, she is as self-protective as the McKinley bill.”