"Don't serve 'em usually; would you have 'em with or without?"
Childress started a long reach over the bar, which the drink-mixer avoided. Then, evidently, he got a glance-of-eye order from Bart Crowe; set out a bottle of ink and a scratchy pen. "We don't cash no checks up here, mister," he asserted, not to be denied a last fling.
The sergeant took the bottle in one hand, the pen in the other and crossed to the board. There he traced a horseshoe on the brow of the half-tone presentment of himself. When he had finished and returned the pen and ink, he swept off his hat and addressed the group at the bar.
"Now, gents, that poster looks something like me," he said casually. "If anyone of you needs a thousand dollars reward——"
He waited. The others stared—stared most fixedly at the horseshoe scar upon his forehead, in that outlaw camp a royal badge.
"Be yourself, son!" The admonition came from Bart Crowe. "Step up and name your poison—one's as bad as the other."
"You don't mind the brand, then?" Childress demanded.
"Hell, no!" said Crowe.
With that the sergeant walked over to the bulletin board and pulled down the poster which he had arranged to have posted against himself. "That's a go," he said. "What'll you all have."
While they were having—mostly "another of the same"—Childress stepped to the swinging door of the back room where a tin-piano and a "fiddle" were making music for some sort of a dance. Several women were there—best not described. They rented cabins from Crowe for a profession that is older than the oldest. The two-piece orchestra blared, and the two couples on the floor seemed to dance until one of the women, a brunette slightly beyond the life she obviously was leading, caught sight of the stranger in the doorway. At once she let go the big lumberjack who was trying to follow her through the steps of a waltz.