The blue-eyed man put out his hand readily.
“I know about you,” said he. “You are in the Rangers, too, down there. That’s a good body of men. I reckon they need to be good.
“Well, it’s a lovely morning,” he continued. “I’ve not had a drink yet this morning.”
They walked down the ragged street, if street it could be called, passing over the railroad track, whose rails as yet hardly had been burnished by any wheels; a track which ran but a few hours’ journey west of Abilene at that time. There was a switch which would accommodate perhaps twenty cars, some pens which would hold perhaps five hundred head of cattle, some chutes which never yet had been used. Like all the rest of Abilene, the yards presented an aspect of raw newness. The residential portion of the city consisted largely of sod houses, dugouts and canvas tents, although it did not lack unpainted pine in its more ambitious structures. The broken expanse of high-fronted wooden buildings along its single main street offered the appearance conventional in the new railroad town of the frontier of the West. There was a Golden Eagle Clothing Store; two or three offering general merchandise. There was no drug store, but there were two barber shops and the Twin Livery Barn. There was no church or school. But, as the apostle of Abilene had said, there were many saloons and free dance-halls, each in its way openly advertising its wares.
Toward the saloon of his choice—which also apparently offered dance-hall accommodations at seasonable hours—Wild Bill bent his steps. The interior still presented a certain dishabille. A sleepy negro was sweeping out the corks. A barrel in a corner held empty bottles in careless profusion. The chairs presented an order apparently not preconcerted, and the legs of some were broken. There was no billiard table in all Abilene, and mahogany was not yet known in any bar of Abilene. None the less, here was a goodly plank, and back of it were arranged shelves still holding bottles of liquid contents in spite of the late obvious demand. The interior was not, to any imagination, howso violent, a lovely thing to see in the ghastly light of day. The light now was rather dim. Two or three kerosene lamps still were burning, yellow and sickly, not devoid of fumes, which joined the other fumes.
“I usually come here for my liquor,” said Wild Bill, “because I know Henry Doak has a barrel of real bourbon, besides what he sells. It ain’t poison. I never go against the liquor game very hard myself.”
“It isn’t best,” said McMasters. “Still, the oldest man I ever knew told me he’d lived so long because every morning before breakfast he took two or three fingers of bourbon—when he could get it—and rubbed his chest with a fresh corncob.”
“As good a way as any,” said Hickok. “A man never dies till his time comes—and then he does.”
He was humming to himself as he searched for the bottle which suited him.
“No three or four fingers for me,” said he. “Too much, especially if you have got anything particular to do.”