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 wanting to sell something, or some fool that didn't know what he wanted. She was by natural bent a little uncharitable in her estimation of mankind.

As she passed the wash-room—fitted with modern plumbing, supplied with water by the railroad water works—she stopped at the sound of a snorting ablution, familiar in her ears.

"Is that you, Myron?" she called.

"Yup," a soapy, cheerful voice replied.

"What're you doin' home this time of day?"

"Run out of shingles," the soapy voice replied, after some blowing as if to clear water out of a dripping mustache.

"Wasn't there any more in the lumber yard?"

"Schudy broke a wheel; couldn't get 'em over till morning, honey."

"Well, when you're through wastin' water in there you go on out and saw up some of them ties."

"Yes, pet."

Mrs. Cowgill went on to the office. Myron Cowgill, under the shadow of whose name the hotel lady lived, came from the wash-room damp and uncombed, with towel lint in his long brown mustache, a cheerful, even a glad, light in his mild blue eyes. He was one of those beings cut to the pattern of a nothing at the beginning. Gangling, loose-jointed, slip-slap and go easy; long black hair with a brown sunburn at the ends, long brown mustache that appeared to draw hard on his cheeks, which were so thin that he seemed to have sucked them in and swallowed all but the rind. His