The Mexican made a laughing gesture, crooking up his elbow. Mrs. Hallard frowned, noting his condition.
“You don’t git no booze here,” she said, “You’ve had enough. Fat’ll bring you some coffee an’ you eat a meal an’ git back on the range. You had trouble enough last time, I should think.”
The fellow sat down, shamefacedly, and Sing Fat came in to serve him. A moment later another customer entered.
“That’s always the way it goes,” Kate Hallard commented, “One straggler always brings another. They’ll come dribblin’ in now, one at a time, till closin’-time.... But I say, Mr. Gabriel Gard, don’t you go thinkin’ I don’t appreciate what you’ve done. I’ll write Westcott like you say, an’ mebby it’ll come out all right; but I ain’t much hopeful of it. Things don’t, much, outside o’ story books.”
The hard look was in her face again. Gard met it with his steady smile.
“You watch this one come out right,” said he. “I guess things mostly are right, if we could see ’em straight.” He was turning toward the door.
“We’re liable sometimes to pick ’em up by the wrong end,” he added. “We’ll find out which is the right end of this before we lift it, and then—” the smile deepened, and included the dark eyes—“Then we’ll lift,” he called back as he closed the door behind him.
Sylvania’s one business street was lighted only by the stars, and the feebler rays that shone from a few illuminated windows. In the yellow glare from one of these a group of cowboys were dismounting by the rail of Jim Bracton’s Happy Family Saloon.
“Howdy, Stranger,” one of them called, as he stumbled against Gard on reaching the ground, “Excuse me.”
He glanced a second time at Gard’s face and smiled, genially. “Thinkin’ o’ minglin’ up in this mad whirl?” he asked, “Come on.” And together they entered the precincts of the Happy Family.