Children, pale and hollow-eyed, coming with pitchers and tin buckets to get beer for their awaking elders, seemed to be the first heralds of the day; then a thin woman, clutching her dirty calico wrapper to her shrunken breast, and trying to hide a bruised, blue and swollen eye behind a shawl, came shuffling into the saloon in unbuttoned shoes, and hoarsely asked for some gin. A little later another woman came in to borrow enough oil to fill the lamp she carried without its chimney, and immediately after, a man, ragged, dirty, stepping in old worn shoes as soft as moccasins, flung himself down in a chair and fell into a stupor, his bloodless lips but a shade darker than his yellow face, his jaws set in the rigidity of the opium smoker. Archie looked at him suspiciously and shot a questioning glance at Bertha.
"The long draw?" he said in a low tone, as she passed him to go to the woman who had the lamp.
"Umph huh," said Bertha.
"I thought maybe he might be--"
"No," she said readily. "He's right--he's been hanging around for a month.--Some oil?" she was saying to the woman. "Certainly, my dear." She took the lamp.
"Where's your husband now?" she asked.
"Oh, he's gone," the woman said simply. "When the coppers put the Silver Moon Café"--she pronounced it "kafe"--"out of business and he lost his job slinging beer, he dug out."
Archie, beginning to fear the publicity of midday, had gone into the back room again. Presently Bertha joined him.
"Thought it was up to me to plant back here," he said, explaining his withdrawal. "There might be an elbow."
"Oh, no," said Bertha, in her hoarse voice, picking up the cigar she had laid on a clock-shelf and resuming her smoking, "we're running under protection now. That dope fiend in there showed up two months ago with his woman. They had a room in at Eva's for a while, but they stunk up the place so with their hops that she cleaned 'em out--she had to have the room papered again, but she says you can still smell it. They left about five hundred paper-back novels behind 'em. My God! they were readers! Nothing but read and suck the bamboo all the time; they were fiends both ways. One's 'bout as bad as the other, I guess."