his voice now rising clear, now falling to distance as if he passed to
and from, in and out of a door, or behind some object which broke the
flow of sound. A whiff of coffee, presently, and the noise of the man
breaking dry sticks, as with his foot, jarring his voice to a deeper
tremolo. Now the light, with the legs of the man in it, showing a
cow-camp, the chuck wagon in the foreground, the hope of hospitality big
in its magnified proportions.

Beyond the fire where the singing cook worked, men were unsaddling their
horses and turning them into the corral. Lambert trundled his bicycle
into the firelight, hailing the cook with a cheerful word.

The cook had a tin plate in his hands, which he was wiping on a flour
sack. At sight of this singular combination of man and wheels he leaned
forward in astonishment, his song bitten off between two words, the tin
plate before his chest, the drying operations suspended. Amazement was
on him, if not fright. Lambert put his hand into his hip-pocket and drew
forth a shining All-in-One, which he always had ready there to produce
as he approached a door.

He stood there with it in his hand, the firelight over him, smiling in
his most ingratiating fashion. That had been one of the strong texts of
the general agent. Always meet them with a smile, he said, and leave
them with a smile, no matter whether they deserved it or not. It proved
a man's unfaltering confidence in himself and the article which he
presented to the world.

Lambert was beginning to doubt even this paragraph of his general
instructions. He had been smiling until he believed his eye-teeth were
wearing thin from exposure, but it seemed the one thing that had a grain
in it among all the buncombe and bluff. And he stood there smiling at
the camp cook, who seemed to be afraid of him, the tin plate held before
his gizzard like a shield.

There was nothing about Lambert's appearance to scare anybody, and least
of all a bow-legged man beside a fire in the open air of the Bad Lands,
where things are not just as they are in any other part of this world at
all. His manner was rather boyish and diffident, and wholly apologetic,
and the All-in-One glistened in his hand like a razor, or a revolver, or
anything terrible and destructive that a startled camp cook might make
it out to be.

A rather long-legged young man, in canvas puttees, a buoyant and
irrepressible light in his face which the fatigues and disappointments
of th