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Over the still-intact glass of the windows cobwebs were draped so thickly as almost to exclude the light of day a strange, fly-infested curtain where once neat green shade-rollers had hung. Even as the bewildered girl sat there, lips parted, eyes wide with amaze, a spider seized his buzzing prey and scampered back into a hole in the wall.
Camor-r-rista!" at her, she would merely shrug her shoulders and say "Andate presto!" to show him she was above quarrelling with a cabman. She ate eggs and bread, and drank the red wine, never having conquered her disgust for Italian meat since first she saw the filthy carcasses, fly-infested, dust-covered, loathsome, being carted through the swarming streets.
We swallowed dust; we humped our shoulders philosophically under the beating of the sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle fly-infested hours waiting for the noon to pass; we slept in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind stables, in hay, anywhere. There was little water, less wood for the cooking.
The Professor was resting, personally and particularly, on a stretcher bed in a small, hot, fly-infested room in "The Devil's Head" Hotel, pending the mending of divers injuries sustained in a disaster that put the show temporarily out of action. Thunder did not travel with his own horses, finding it much cheaper to hire a team to pull his caravan from one pitch to another.
At a dingy, fly-infested place called "Red's Quick Lunch" whither Johnny, mindful of his low finances, piloted him, Bland ordered largely and complained because his "T bone" was too rare, and afterwards because it was tough. Johnny dined on "coffee and sinkers" so that he could afford Bland's steak and "French fried" and hot biscuits and pie and two cups of coffee.
The dismalness of the place is beyond description at all times of the year. In winter it is bleak and chilly; in summer it is hot, fly-infested, and hideously and ironically reminiscent of real fields and real grass. The population is calculated to change completely about every three years, and I'm sure I am not surprised.
Then would come the time for another inoculation with emetine, and we would join the long line of men waiting, stripped to the waist, for Captain Hummel's needle. We prayed that it might be effective, and that we should be spared the curse of dysentery and long nights of misery in and about the fly-infested latrines.
Children cringed and wept while necks were scrubbed relentlessly, for a fever of "visiting" attacked the women of the range. Miles they would travel to visit a neighbor. And there they talked and talked and talked, while the guest in neighborly fashion dried the dinner dishes for the hostess in hot, fly-infested kitchens.
"I bring good medicine." He passed quietly out into the woods. When he returned, he carried a bundle of snake-root which he made into tea. Annette did not wish to touch it, but her mother persuaded her to take a few sips from a cup held by Rolf. "Wah! this not good," and Quonab glanced about the close, fly-infested room. "I must make lodge."
What wonder that men will often take chances in some fierce rapid, rather than to make a long carry through the fly-infested woods. It was weighty evidence of Bill's fidelity that again and again they made a portage around rapids he had often run, because in the present case he was in sacred trust of that much prized commodity fur.
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