IN WHICH LANCE FINISHES ONE JOB
In the Traffic saloon, whither Lance had gone to find a fire and an easy chair and something cheering to drink while he waited for the pinto team to rest and eat, he found a sleepy bartender sprawled before the stove, a black-and-white dog stretched flat on its side and growling while it dreamed, and an all-pervading odor of alcoholic beverages that appealed to him.
“A highball would make me happy, right now,” he announced cheerfully, standing over the bartender, rubbing his fingers numbed from the keen air and from holding in the pintos, to which a slackened pull on the bits meant a tacit consent to a headlong run.
“Been to the dance?” The bartender yawned widely and went to mix the highball. “I been kinda waitin’ up––but shucks! No tellin’ when the crowd’ll git in––not if they drink all they took with ’em.”
“They were working hard to do just that when I left.” Lance stood back to the stove. Having 173 left in a hurry, without his overcoat, he was chilled to the bone, though the night had been mild for that time of the year. He hoped that the girl had not been uncomfortable––and yawned while the thought held him. He drank his highball, warmed himself comfortably and then, with some one’s fur overcoat for a blanket, he disposed his big body on a near-by pool table, never dreaming that Mary Hope Douglas was remembering his tone, his words, his silence even; analyzing, weighing, wondering how much he had meant, or how little,––wondering whether she really hated him, whether she might justly call her ponderings by any name save curiosity. Such is the way of women the world over.
What Lance thought does not greatly matter. Such is the way of men that their thoughts sooner or later crystallize into action. The bartender would tell you that he went straight to sleep, with the fur coat pulled up over his ears and his legs uncovered, his modishly-shod feet extending beyond the end of the table. The bartender dozed in his chair, thinking it not worth while to close up, because the dance crowd might come straying in at any time with much noise and a great thirst, to say nothing of the possibility of thirsty men coming on the midnight freight that was always four or five hours late, and was now much overdue.
The freight arrived. Three men entered the saloon, drank whisky, talked for a few minutes and 174 departed. The bartender took a long, heat-warped poker and attacked the red clinkers in the body of the stove, threw in a bucket of fresh coal, used the poker with good effect on the choked draft beneath, and went back to his chair and his dozing.
During the clamor of the fire-building Lance turned over, drawing up his feet and straightway extending them again; making a sleepy, futile clutch at the fur coat, that had slipped off his shoulders when he turned. The bartender reached out and flung the coat up on Lance’s shoulders, and bit off a chew of tobacco and stowed it away in his cheek. Presently he dozed again.
Dawn seeped in through the windows. Lance, lying flat on his stomach with his face on his folded arms, slept soundly. The unpainted buildings across the street became visible in the gloomy, lifeless gray of a sunless morning. With the breeze that swept a flurry of gray dust and a torn newspaper down the street, came the rattle of a wagon, the sound of voices mingled in raucous, incoherent wrangling.
“They’re comin’,” yawned the bartender, glancing at the sleeper on the pool table. “Better wake up; they’re comin’ pickled and fighty, judgin’ by the sound.”