"Up to Gibbs's. Want to go 'long?"
Archie's heart gave a little start; to go to Danny Gibbs's under Mason's patronage would be a distinction. The evening opened all at once with sparkling possibilities.
"An old friend o' mine's there," Mason explained as they walked along up Kentucky Street. "He's just got out of a shooting scrape; he croaked that fellow Benny Moon. Remember?"
Gibbs's place was scarcely more than a block away; it displayed no sign; a three-story building of brick, a side door, and a plate-glass window in front; a curtain hiding half the window, a light above--that was all.
Mason entered with an assurance that impressed Archie, who had never before felt the need of assurance in entering a saloon. He looked about; it was like any other saloon, a long bar and a heavy mirror that reflected the glasses and the bottles of green and yellow liqueurs arranged before it. At one table sat a tattered wreck of a man, his head bowed on his forearms crossed on the table, fast asleep--one of the many broken lives that found with Danny Gibbs a refuge. Over the mirror behind the bar hung an opium pipe, long since disused, serving as a relic now, the dreams with which it had once relieved the squalor and remorse of a wasted life long since broken.
At Mason's step, however, there was a stir in the room behind the bar-room, and a woman entered. She walked heavily, as if her years and her flesh were burdensome; her face was heavy, tired and expressionless. She was plainly making for the bar, as if to keep alive the pretense of a saloon, but when she saw Mason she stopped, her face lighted up, becoming all at once matronly and pleasant, and she smiled as she came forward, holding out a hand.
"Why, Joe," she said, "is that you? When did you get out?"
"This morning," he said. "Where's Dan?"
"He's back here; come in," and she turned and led the way.
Mason followed, drawing Archie behind him, and they entered the room behind the bar-room. The atmosphere changed--the room was light, it was lived in, and the four men seated at a round bare table gave to the place its proper character. Three of the men had small tumblers filled with whisky before them, the fourth had none; he sat tilted back in his chair, his stiff hat pulled down over his eyes, his hands sunk in the pockets of his trousers; his fat thighs flattened on the edge of his chair. He was dressed in modest gray, and might have been taken for a commonplace business man. He lifted his blue eyes quickly and glanced at the intruders; his face was round and cleanly shaved, save for a little blond mustache that curled at the corners of his mouth. His hair, of the same color as his mustache, glistened slightly at the temples, where it was touched by gray. This man had no whisky glass before him--he did not drink, but he sat there with an air of presiding over this little session, plainly vested with some authority--sat, indeed, as became Danny Gibbs, the most prominent figure in the under world.