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 were not eating, Simpson wondered as he unsaddled his borrowed horse before the bunk-house door.

This bunk-house was a small log pen with a roof over it. The floor was original earth; the door, hung on leather hinges, had torn loose at the bottom. It swung crankily out of plumb, half blocking the entrance. There were bunks along the walls for ten or twelve men, their hay mattresses thrown around untidily. But it was no worse than many a cowman's home that Tom Simpson had seen during his years in the west, and little below his expectations of Coburn.

Simpson rummaged around till he found hay in a shed, put his horse in a corral, of which there were several, threw Coburn's saddle with its supposedly precious roll into a bunk, propped the crazy door out of the way with a board and sat down to have a smoke. There had been quite a violent smell of something burning on the stove as he talked with Mrs. Coburn at the front door, mingling with the unmistakable savor of fried ham. Supper was either getting or got. Taking the faces of the children as the foundation for a guess, Simpson guessed no. They were uniformly dirty all over. There would have been some high lights around their mouths if they had been fed.

He was sitting in the bunk-house door, twilight creeping around him, speculating on whether Mrs. Coburn would invite him to supper or expected him to apply, when the largest of the children, a boy of about seven, a swaggering, freckled, slit-eyed little replica of the cowboy type, came shooting out of the kitchen door, heading for, the visitor. He pulled up short a few rods away, where he