Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/125

 in oil, and plenty of it—and unquestionably a profanation of art. In the mildly cynical core of him Dr. Hall would have admitted the truth of this anywhere else, but in the presence of Elizabeth he pronounced it good. That came out of his desire to serve her, even to calling poor pictures excellent, down to the last one in the gallery of life.

The parlor was narrow and deep, but surprisingly bright and cheerful. It comprised all the shorter wing of the house, the door entering abruptly into it from the outside, without hall or vestibule to ease one gradually into its somewhat overfurnished interior, which must have been grandeur once for that far-off ranch-house on the lonely plains.

The lime to plaster it must have been brought from a laborious distance, and the heavy furniture of the early fifties conveyed at great trouble and expense from the nearest unloading point on the railroad nearly a hundred miles to the north. Yet nothing much to a pioneer in those days, Hall thought; perhaps little more to the men who were crowding into this country at the present time to saddle its buffalo-backed hills to the service of husbandry.

There were walnut chairs with tapestry upholstering in the parlor, and a sofa with lions' heads carved in its arms, covered with haircloth that was wearing thin; there were bookcases which reached almost to the ceiling, filled with alluring volumes which had the stain of age; in the farther end of the room, before a wide fireplace, a table of such ancient type, so huge, so broad and strong, that it might have come from some ambassadorial hall. What a strange fancy in a man, to carry it all into the unpeopled