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 town and that day, sufficient to keep the vulgar in their proper place.

It was that slack hour in the afternoon between dinner and supper—there was no such meal as luncheon in the heavy economy of the Cottonwood Hotel—when cook and dining-room girls, as well as Mrs. Cowgill, had a little while to catch their breath. Mrs. Cowgill encouraged the girls to make use of the parlor during this lull, their presence there giving the house an air of liveliness and continual business. Goosie frequently pumped the organ in the afternoon, and sang her sentimental songs, although she could not merge herself so completely and comfortably with the lost ladies of the ballads when there was anybody around as she could when alone, and in a darkened place.

Mrs. Cowgill had a son, a knock-kneed, shambling, long-armed stuttering chap of twenty-four or five, who had a regular run firing a through freight. She called him Herby, but everybody else called him Pap. He was laying over today, and he also was in the parlor, spread out on the sofa in the elegant repose of a man who could afford it. He had blue sleeve-holders with tassels. Pap had a naturally leering and goggling look about him which seemed to mock and discredit everybody, and everything they said. He talked slowly and thickly, his words catching frequently, like a knot at the end of a rope.

So these three lights of civilization were in the parlor of the Cottonwood Hotel, engaged in a three-cornered