“How’d you like it?” asked Mr. Sutton, folding his pudgy hands across his protuberant front. “What sort of a place is it? Gamblers—heh? Cowboys, shootin’ parties, sage brush, prairie fires, etcetery—heh?”
“You’ve named the principal features of the great West,” drawled David. “It’s all there, more particularly the et cetera. There’s lots of that roaming about.”
He pulled his hat over his eyes and stepped down from the veranda.
“I may not be back to dinner,” he said, “but I’d like a decent steak for supper, if you can get it in this centre of civilization.”
Mr. Sutton watched the young man’s muscular figure in its leisurely progress down the street. Then he went back to the barroom, where his underling, a slim, sallow young man, with oily black hair parted very particularly in the middle of his narrow head, was languidly arranging clean glasses on a tray.
“He’s hot stuff, ain’t he?” observed the bartender.
“Who?—Whitcomb?”
“Thinks he’s the whole thing, don’t he?”
Mr. Sutton frowned. “I ain’t made up my mind ’bout that young feller,” he said ponderously. “But I’m kind of watchin’ him. It strikes me he’ll bear—watchin’.”