Beason rattled me down another length of street—and if the folks we bumped hadn’t known him I reckon we would have had a few things on our hands besides that man hunt. They all seemed to know Beason. He snapped questions right and left.
All at once my guide got a clue. He barked a few more questions at this illuminative party, and turned and scooted back along our trail.
“The old cuss has taken to a back room,” he gasped. “I ought to have figured that he would be hiding.”
He rushed me around comers, across streets, down alleys, and into more streets. We came up against a saloon at last where the front window was lettered in red paint, “Holding Ground Cove.” Knowing, as a deep-sea diver, that a good holding ground means a mud bottom, I could have thought up a highly moral and somewhat humorous apothegm on that name for a saloon if I had had the time; but Mr. Beason was cutting comers on Time that night. He rushed me into the saloon, into a back room at the rear, and when he didn’t see what we were looking for up-stairs we went. There were cribs of private rooms, furnished with bare tables and hard chairs—drinking-rooms. From the half-open door of one came the cackle of much laughter, and we peeped in.
A girl, whose face was painted in almost as gaudy hues as her red stockings, was standing on a table in the middle of the little room.
Capt. Rask Holstrom was seated in a chair, straddling the back, and was busily engaged in tickling the girl’s nose with the tip of a very long peacock feather—and wherever he secured that feather I never found out. But always leave it to a hilarious drunken man to find something odd to carry around with him. In the room was the human belaying-pin, also seated. But his chair had evidently slipped from under him when he tried to lean against the wall, and he was jack-knifed down in a corner, with his broomstick legs waving in the air, and was surveying the scene between that frame. He was squealing laughter in a key that would have put a guinea-hen out of business.
“There’s Ingot Ike,” affirmed Beason, “and if t’other one is your pertickler friend then I’ll cash in.”
He held up his cheap watch, with his dirty forefinger indicating the hour.
“I get the twenty with nine minutes’ ‘velvet,’ if that’s your friend.”
But Captain Holstrom did not display any very ardent friendship for any one just then. He turned an especially malevolent stare in my direction and poised his peacock feather like lance in rest. I could see that something was going to break loose there mighty soon, and after what I had told Beason I didn’t want that young sneak to overhear. It would be like him to come back with a gang and “do” me on the excuse that I was a stranger who was “frsking” Captain Holstrom for his pocketful.