A magazine, with a zebra-skinned woman on the cover and pages damp — retrieved from a hole in the foundations of a barn — was held up to the light and admired. From beneath one pair of coveralls there thrust two shiny leather boots. A leather jacket could be seen at the collar and from the breast pocket there hung the broad white elastic strap of a pair of goggles. He did not speak but watched the cowboy with the rest.
“That must’ve been the car I met. Parked up the road apiece where the driver’s kid was snakebit.”
They stirred as if to rise and settled again, the spy among them silent, faces turned to the shadow.
“I reckon not. I don’t reckon a car like that’d ever stop out here.”
One pulled a bright new harmonica from his pocket and began to play. The man with the magazine finally turned past the cover, and from across the highway, where the store had competed with the Buckhouse ten years before, there was a sudden rustling in the brush and a pebble dropped into a hidden well.
“Keep a good watch, boys,” said Luke and squaring his hat stepped inside and up to the plywood bar. He was watched as he entered and the wheeze of the mouth organ softly faded.
Those who might have remembered that ears had been chewed off long ago in Buckhouse brawls and that women from over many borders, slipped by lax patrols, had been forced to whirl their skirts hip-high at gun point, had passed to other diggings and other cabarets of dried earth. Only a few, remembering how the fights and women had pushed their way outside and over to the porch of the store, driving the keeper through his rear window, lingered close to the old places, within a range of twenty miles.
The spangled, tinkling lantern shade, with red beads and panes of blue, still slid and turned around the single light globe, filling the quiet, summer evening air with twitching, faded streamers of color. There were twenty-two caliber bullet holes in the ceiling.
“Bowl of chowder and shot of muscatel,” said Luke. He rested his foot lightly on the lead pipe rail and stared, pinching his chin in his hands, at the cans of beer pyramided before the dusty mirror behind the bar.
“Bohn been around tonight?”