The sleeves of her gaudy dress were rolled back above the elbows, exposing her fat yet muscular arms, not overclean; and the dingy pipe she had been smoking protruded from the open bosom of her gown.
"Where have you been during all this busy afternoon, Joseph?" she asked, still standing.
"To hell!"
"Your missionaries have taught me that people only go to hell from choice, Joseph; that is, if there is any worse hell anywhere than we are in all the time,—which I love the Great Spirit too well to believe. It seems to me we are compelled to take the punishment we bring upon ourselves here and now."
"You haven't any right to think, you loathsome, disgusting—"
"Stop, Joseph Addicks! This is, you say, a white man's country now. Will you prove it by behaving yourself like a gentleman? I didn't live for four years in a white man's country for nothing."
He arose and left the table without a word. His wife had seen him in moods like this before.
"Come, John; come, Annie; take your seats at table. You must be half famished."
Four or five smaller children as dusky as herself were playing on the earthen floor; and, leaning helplessly against a pyramid of flour sacks, lashed in Indian style to its birchen cradle, was a pappoose of three months, defencelessly enduring an attack of mosquitoes on its face and eyes.
"My father was a fool for sending me to college," thought Joseph Ranger, who, like many others that go wrong, was ready to blame everything and everybody except himself. "The university should have stopped that hazing before it began, so I couldn't have had that fracas."
"Why didn't you eat your dinner, Joseph?" asked his wife, after she had fed the children.
