A pang so sharp and violent that it was nearly audible passed through the expectant group. Hope died a sudden death when they saw his legs. It vanished like the effervescence from charged water, likewise their smile. He wore puttees! He was the prospectors' ancient enemy. He was a Yellow Leg! A mining expert--but who was he representing? Without knowing, they suspected "the Guggenheimers"--when in doubt they always suspected the Guggenheimers.
They stood aside to let him pass, their cold eyes following his legs down the tunnel, waiting in the freezing atmosphere to avoid the appearance of indecent haste, though they burned to make a bee-line for the register.
"Wilbur Dill,--Spokane" was the name he inscribed upon the spotless page with many curlicues, while Ma Snow waited with a graceful word of greeting, bringing with her the fragrant odors of the kitchen.
"Welcome to our mountain home."
As Mr. Dill bowed gallantly over her extended hand he became aware that there was to be fried ham for supper.
He was shown to his room but came down again with considerable celerity, rubbing his knuckles, and breaking the highly charged silence of the office with a caustic comment upon the inconvenience of sleeping in cold storage.
There was a polite murmur of assent but nothing further, as his hearers knew what he did not--that Pa Snow upstairs was listening. Yankee Sam however tactfully diverted his thoughts to the weather, hoping thus indirectly to draw out his reason for undertaking the hardship of such a trip in winter. But whatever Mr. Dill's business it appeared to be of a nature which would keep, although they sat expectantly till Miss Rosie coyly announced supper.
"Don't you aim to set down, Uncle Bill?" she asked kindly as the rest filed in.
"Thanks, no, I et late and quite hearty, an' I see the Try-bune's come."
"I should think you'd want to eat every chance you got after all you went through out hunting."
"It's that, I reckon, what's took my appetite," the old man answered soberly, as he produced his steel-rimmed spectacles and started to read what the Beaver Creek postmistress had left him of his newspaper.
Inside, Mr. Dill seated himself at the end of the long table which a placard braced against the castor proclaimed as sacred to the "transient." A white tablecloth served as a kind of dead-line over which the most audacious regular dared not reach for special delicacies when Ma Snow hovered in the vicinity.
"Let me he'p yoah plate to some Oregon-grape jell," Ma Snow was urging in her honied North Carolina accent, when, by that mysterious sixth sense which she seemed to possess, or the eye which it was believed she concealed by the arrangement of her back hair, she became suddenly aware of the condition of Mr. Lannigan's hands.