Presently the door on my left opened—Sheriff Johnson came into the room.
“Good evenin’,” he said; and a dozen voices, one after another, answered with “Good evenin’! good evenin’, Sheriff!” A big frontiersman, however, a horse-dealer called Martin, who, I knew, had been on the old vigilance committee, walked from the centre of the group in front of the bar to the Sheriff, and held out his hand with:
“Shake, old man, and name the drink.” The Sheriff took the proffered hand as if mechanically, and turned to the bar with “Whisky—straight.”
Sheriff Johnson was a man of medium height, sturdily built. A broad forehead, and clear, grey-blue eyes that met everything fairly, testified in his favour. The nose, however, was fleshy and snub. The mouth was not to be seen, nor its shape guessed at, so thickly did the brown moustache and beard grow; but the short beard seemed rather to exaggerate than conceal an extravagant out jutting of the lower jaw, that gave a peculiar expression of energy and determination to the face. His manner was unobtrusively quiet and deliberate.
It was an unusual occurrence for Johnson to come at night to the bar-lounge, which was beginning to fall into disrepute among the puritanical or middle-class section of the community. No one, however, seemed to pay any further attention to him, or to remark the unusual cordiality of Martin’s greeting. A quarter of an hour elapsed before anything of note occurred. Then, an elderly man whom I did not know, a farmer, by his dress, drew a copy of the “Kiota Tribune” from his pocket, and, stretching it towards Johnson, asked with a very marked Yankee twang:
“Sheriff, hev yeou read this ‘Tribune’?”
Wheeling half round towards his questioner, the Sheriff replied:
“Yes, sir, I hev.” A pause ensued, which was made significant to me by the fact that the bar-keeper suspended his hand and did not pour out the whisky he had just been asked to supply—a pause during which the two faced each other; it was broken by the farmer saying:
“Ez yeou wer out of town to-day, I allowed yeou might hev missed seein’ it. I reckoned yeou’d come straight hyar before yeou went to hum.”
“No, Crosskey,” rejoined the Sheriff, with slow emphasis; “I went home first and came on hyar to see the boys.”