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.

She whirled upon him like a catamount and her weak blue eyes watered in
a way they had when she was about to show the hardness of a Lucretia
Borgia. Her voice, too, that quivered as though on the verge of tears,
had a quality in it which sent shivers up and down the spines of those
who were familiar with it.

"Lannigan, what did I tell you?"

It was obvious enough that Lannigan knew what she had told him for he
immediately jerked his hands off the oilcloth, and hid them under the
table.

He answered with a look of innocence:

"Why, I don't know ma'am."

"Go out and wash them hands!"

Hands, like murder, will out. Concealment was no longer possible, since
it was a well-known fact that Lannigan had hands, so he held them in
front of him and regarded them in well-feigned surprise.

"I declare I never noticed!"

It was difficult to imagine how such hands could have escaped
observation, even by their owner, as they looked as though he had used
them for scoops to remove soot from a choked chimney. Also the
demarcation lines