Dean's face was alight with the excitement of dramatizing the long-past scene. He laid his stick on the bar and bent over, with his white fingers held as if they poised cards. He was a good mimic. One could easily imagine the scene on the trampled grass, with the white canvas tents of the circus for a background.
"Dick Nolan and Joe Hipp were capping, and Dick would come up--he had the best gilly make-up in the world, you understand, a paper collar, a long linen duster and big green mush--he'd look over the cards--see?"--Dean leaned over awkwardly like a country-man, pointing with a crooked forefinger--"and then he'd say, 'I think it's that one.'"
His voice had changed; he spoke in the cracked tone of the farmer, and his little audience laughed.
"Well, the guy hollers, you understand, but at the come-back they're all swipes--working in the horse tents; you'd never know 'em. And then," Dean went on, with the exquisite pleasure of remembering, "old Ben Mellott was there working the send--you remember Ben, Dan?"
Gibbs nodded.
"Jake Rend was running the side-show, and old Jew Cohen had a dollar store--a drop-case, you know."
Gibbs nodded again. Dean grew meditative, and a silence fell on the group.
"We had a great crowd of knucks, too; the guns to-day are nothing to them. Those were the days, Dan. Course, there wasn't much in it at that."
Dean meditated over the lost days a moment, and then he grew cheerful again.
"I met Luke Evans last fall, Dan," he began again. "In England. The major and I were running between London and Liverpool, working the steamer trains, and him and me--"