reading "special" text files

hello,

assume you have a txt-file (sep="\t" or "") looking as follows that you 
want to read into a variable:

1	1	2			3
2	1	2	3		4
3	1	5	6	7	8

the result should look like this (e.g., in a data.frame):

1	1	2	3
2	1	2	3	4
3	1	5	6	7	8

is there any way to do so?

thanks in advance,
jan