CHAPTER II
The scene in which Gard found himself was of a sort he had known familiarly enough in years past. The low-ceilinged shanty, rough-boarded and blackened; the sawdust-strewn floor, the painted bar with its distorting mirror and motley array of bottles, and even the faces of the men showing duskily through the smoke-veiled light of flaring coal-oil lamps, seemed to him like details of a half-forgotten dream.
The evening was fairly begun and the place was filling. A group of prospectors near the bar were listening derisively to the brand-new theory one of their number was propounding, regarding the whereabouts of the lost Peg-leg mine. At the farther end of the room the thump of a broken-down wheel-of-fortune and the monotonous calls of its manipulator, proclaimed the occupation of the crowd of Mexicans gathered there. Some cowboys at a table near the door were engaged in a game of dominoes, and beyond them three or four men were playing poker. Gard noticed with some surprise that one man of this group was an Indian, who seemed to be betting freely.
“That there’s old Joe Papago,” the cowboy who had come in with him volunteered, noting his glance. “Old Joe, he’s the best-fixed Injun ’round here. I hearn he sold ten head o’ beef cows over t’ Tucson, yesterday, an’ got his money. Must ’a’ got whiskey, too, by the looks of ’im.”
He put a foot on the bar rail and surveyed the scene tolerantly.
“There’s a mighty ornery bunch o’ human buzzards hangs out in this town o’ Sylvania,” he said, candidly. “But a feller’s gotter pass some time in social pursuits now ’n again, an’ he has to take his kind as he meets up with ’em.”
Gard was still recently enough from solitude to thrill with the sense of human companionship.
“’T ain’t always the roughest looking ones that are the worst,” he suggested, sympathetically.
“That’s where you’re shoutin’.” The cow-puncher brought a big fist down emphatically. “For all right hell,” he said, “a real polished gent can give these chaps cards an’ spades an’ beat ’em to the devil when he tries. We had one here last year, a gent that played cards—played ’em too damn well fer his own health, finally. But he was that polished in his manners as I ever went anywheres to see, an’ he could lie in five different languages.”
“Yes, sir,” he added, meditatively, “five different kinds o’ mortal human conversations that feller had a cinch onto; an’ he couldn’t behave hisself in ary one of ’em.”