Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/176

164 father could not. However, we'll have a grand shoot to-morrow. I'm going to put you in this room here at the end. Just make yourself at home. When you've washed up, come right down the veranda here to the middle door, and come in. We are all there."

The room was small and square with thick adobe walls and a floor made of square, red irregular tiles. These must have been laid directly on the hard soil for their surface was uneven. The furnishings were of the simplest. Two small windows looked out through deep embrasures across the oakdotted flat to the low, even sagebrush hills a quarter mile away. And from these hills Kenneth heard faintly through the gathering dusk the jaunty staccato notes of quail.

His toilet did not take him long. He proceeded along the narrow veranda, also tile paved, past the entrances to two rooms similar to his own, and so to a long chamber occupying the whole centre. It was lighted at this moment only by the flames of a fire leaping in a tremendous fireplace. Kenneth standing in the doorway made out a table at one end set for eating; a shelf of books; a half dozen deer heads; skins of animals tacked against the wall; pegs from which hung bridles, spurs, ropes; a rack in the corner for guns; another, smaller, round table cluttered with books, magazines, pipes, tobacco jars, loose cartridges, and similar untidinesses. The floor, still of the big square uneven tiles, was partly covered by a bright rug of Indian or Mexican weave and a number of coyote skins. Overhead were heavy horizontal beams. A number of light, portable chairs, unoccupied, were scattered about. A divan and three heavy easy chairs were grouped before the fireplace, and the heads of their occupants were silhouetted against the flames. Tobacco smoke lay in strata, or eddied violently when caught by the currents of air.

Corbell came forward at once to greet his guest. The others turned their heads and waved their hands.

"Come up to the fire," invited the ranchman. "The evenings are chilly over the mountains at this time of year. You know these men. We'll have some supper shortly."

Kenneth greeted Frank Moore and Bill Hunter. A welter