night."

"A biscuit-shooter!" said I.

Loyal Mrs. Taylor stirred some batter in silence. "Well," said she then,
"I'm told that's what the yard-hands of the railroad call them poor
waiter-girls. You might hear it around the switches at them division
stations."

I had heard it in higher places also, but meekly accepted the reproof.

If you have made your trans-Missouri journeys only since the new era of
dining-cars, there is a quantity of things you have come too late for,
and will never know. Three times a day in the brave days of old you
sprang from your scarce-halted car at the summons of a gong. You
discerned by instinct the right direction, and, passing steadily through
doorways, had taken, before you knew it, one of some sixty chairs in
a room of tables and catsup bottles. Behind the chairs, standing
attention, a platoon of Amazons, thick-wristed, pink-and-blue, began
immediately a swift chant. It hymned the total bill-of-fare at a blow.
In this inexpressible ceremony the name of every dish went hurtling into
the next, telescoped to shapelessness. Moreover, if you stopped your
Amazon in the middle, it dislocated her, and she merely went back and
took a fresh start. The chant was always the same, but you never learned
it. As soon as it began, your mind snapped shut like the upper berth
in a Pullman. You must have uttered appropriate words--even a parrot
will--for next you were eating things--pie, ham, hot cakes--as fast as
you could. Twenty minutes of swallowing, and all aboard for Ogden, with
your pile-driven stomach dumb with amazement. The Strasburg goose is
not dieted with greater velocity, and "biscuit-shooter" is a grand word.
Very likely some Homer of the railroad yards first said it--for what
men upon the present earth so speak with imagination's tongue as we
Americans?

If Miss Peck had been a biscuit-shooter, I could account readily for her
conversation, her equipped deportment, the maturity in her round, blue,
marble eye. Her abrupt laugh, something beyond gay, was now sounding
in response to Mr. McLean's lively sallies, and I found him fanning her
into convalescence with his hat. She herself made but few remarks, but
allowed the cow-puncher to entertain her, merely exclaiming briefly
now and then, "I declare!" and "If you ain't!" Lin was most certainly
engaging, if that was the lady's meaning. His wide-open eyes sparkled
upon her, and he half closed them now and then to look at her more
effectively