Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/109

 stood with hands in the pockets of his long, barrel-legged overalls, legs spraddled, impertinent and challenging.

"Say, kid; you got anything to eat?" he inquired.

"Not a smell," Simpson replied.

"Well, mother said you'd better come on in and eat what's left, then," the kid announced.

It was an ungracious invitation, but a welcome one. Simpson sat at a corner of the table in the kitchen where his supper had been assembled out of the leavings, as the boy had frankly said. There was no indignity intended, no affront of inferiority implied. Mrs. Coburn would have treated her husband in exactly the same indifferent way.

There were beans and biscuits, and potatoes in the jackets—which had boiled dry, accounting for the smell of burning rags—with fried ham and coffee. There was a yellow bowl of preserves, made especially for railroaders and cowmen out of apple cores, coal tar and gelatin, ringed around by a rim of flies. The boy who had carried the dubious invitation pushed it along the oilcloth-covered table out of the stranger's reach, and stood pursing his mouth and drawing his brows belligerently as if inviting remarks on the hospitality of that house. Mrs. Coburn had disappeared. Simpson could hear her moving around in the other part of the house, and wondered whether she was morose and resentful of his intrusion, or merely dumb.

The children stood around looking at the stranger in their kitchen, every mother's son of them—they all appeared to be boys—upright on his own proper legs, although tthe smallest could not have been two years old. Nature had equipped them well for their environment.