And outside in the snow one o’ them horses gives a long, weary, hungry neigh. That horse breakin’ in bust somethin’ inside of me and Parrigin and Edmund. Edmund he gives a kind of youp! Parrigin curls over on the counter, and I’d have laid right down on the sacks, only I wasn’t near ’em, and so I leaned up against the shelves. Nobody else did nothin’ because Jake and Baldy hadn’t any heart left after seem’ themselves in their true light, and the other Texans they was bein’ very careful now about their geography--they were savin’ it up, they wasn’t givin’ any of it away, not even to charity. But after his youp Edmund pulls himself up and he takes charge of the meetin’, and when me and Parrigin hears him beginnin’ a speech we comes to and listens. “This is a great valley,” says Edmund, behind his desk. “It has song and story whipped to a finish.” Then he fixes his big glum eyes on Kultus Jake and Frisco Baldy. “Don’t think,” says he, “you’ll draw me into your argument. But you hold the record. Wherever Washington is, it would have stayed there till spring. Your words haven’t moved it anywhere else. But you have lost your winter over this. Couldn’t you have waited and come home with your load of furs, and been a success instead of a failure? For you can’t turn around and go back into the mountains now; you’d never get halfway, and unless unusual weather follows this soon, the passes will be choked for the next three months.” Edmund stops with that. It was fairly hard on the poor old blinkin’ junipers--but y’u’ll notice Edmund hadn’t told ’em a word about the grubstakin’. “If everybody will come in here,” he says, “perhaps we can find some child to settle the question.” He opens the door and we all shambles in through after him to the school-room. Miss Carey she rises from her chair, and of course she don’t know what to make of it. “Miss Carey,” says Edmund, “will some of your scholars kindly tell us what the capital of the United States is, and where it is?” Miss Carey she looks at the kids sittin’ around the table fixed for ’em. Gosh, y’u’d ought to have seen the hands fly up all over the room! “Everybody may answer,” says Miss Carey. And out they yells it. It was like the chorus they was practisin’ for Christmas. Oh, she had ’em trained! There was long breaths of relief drawn among the men standin’ sheepish by the door--two or three regular sighs come out from that crowd. “Thank you, Miss Carey,” says Edmund, “and please excuse us for troubling you.” So he leads the way back into the store and goes behind his desk. If anybody expected him to make another speech they was disappointed. Edmund looked cold and ca’m, and just as unconcerned as though he’d been addin’ sums or readin’ a two-weeks-old newspaper. He starts writin’ at his ledger. “Well, I’ll be late for dinner,” says the Texan. “I told y’u where it was,” says another.