Overland Red, a harsh note in the somnolence of the place, stepped buoyantly across the square. And here, if ever, Overland was at home.
A swarthy, fat Mexican shaved him while a lean old rurale of Overland's earlier acquaintance obligingly accepted some pesos with which to drink the señor's health, and other pesos with which to purchase certain clothing for the señor.
The retired rurale drove a relentless bargain with a countryman, returning with certain picturesque garments that Overland donned in the back room of the little circus-blue barber shop.
The tramp had worthily determined to hold wise and remunerative converse with the first Easterner that "looked good to him." He would make half-truths do double duty. He needed money to purchase a burro, packs, canteen, pick, shovel, dynamite, and provisions. He intended to repay the investor by money-order from some desert town as soon as he found the hidden gold. This unusual and worthy intention lent Overland added assurance, and he needed it. Fortune, goddess evanishing and coy, was with him for once. If he could but dodge the plain-clothes men long enough to outfit and get away....
The "Mojave Bar," on North Main Street of the City of Angels was all but empty. Upon it the lassitude of early afternoon lay heavily. The spider-legged music-racks of the Mexican string orchestra, the empty platform chairs, the deserted side-tables along the pictured wall, the huge cactus scrawled over with pin-etched initials,—all the impedimenta of the saloon seemed to slumber.
The white-coated proprietor, with elbows on the bar, gazed listlessly at a Remington night-scene—a desert nocturne with a shadowy adobe against the blue-black night, a glimmer of lamplight through a doorway, and in the golden pathway a pony and rider and the red flash of pistol shots.
Opposite the bartender, at a table against the wall, sat a young man, clad in cool gray. He smoked a cigarette, and occasionally sipped from a tall glass. He was slender, clean-cut, high-colored, an undeniable patrician. In his mild gray eyes, deep down, gleamed a latent humor, an interior twinkling not apparent to the multitude.
Sweeney Orcutt, the saloon-keeper, noticed this reserve characteristic now for the first time, as the young man turned toward him. Sweeney was a retired plain-clothes man with a record, and a bank account. It was said that he knew every crook from Los Angeles to New York. Be it added, to his credit, that he kept his own counsel—attending to his own business on both sides of the bar.
"Do they ever do those things now?" queried the young man, nodding toward the picture.
Sweeney Orcutt smiled a thin-lipped smile. "Not much. Sometimes in Texas or Mexico. I seen the day when they did."