A dented lard-pail without a handle did meagre duty as a teakettle, and balanced upon a corner of the stove was a dirty frying pan.

The fire had gone dead and the room was chill with the rising of the wind.
The table was filled with empty cans and tin plates and cracked, oven-stained bowls and iron-handled knives and forks, and the bunk in the corner was a tumble of gray blankets and unpleasant, red-flowered comforts--corner-wads, Charming Billy was used to calling them--and for pillows there were two square, calico-covered cushions, depressingly ugly in pattern and not over-clean.
Billy sighed again, threaded a needle with coarse, black thread and attacked petulantly a long rent in his coat.

"Darn this bushwhacking all over God's earth after a horse a man can't stay with, nor even hold by the bridle reins," he complained dispiritedly.

"I could uh cleaned the blamed shack up so it would look like folks was living here--and I woulda, if I didn't have to set all day and toggle up the places in my clothes"-- Billy muttered incoherently over a knot in his thread.

"I've been plumb puzzled, all winter, to know whether it's man or cattle I'm supposed to chappyrone.