Blue, acrid wreaths of smoke filled the room, and the atmosphere became very warm. No one would have guessed it was forty below in the street, The two lines of guests at the table and the host at its head emptied glasses and refilled, tossed them off and ladled up again. Small talk hummed, and jests cracked out, more or less coarse in the intervals when pretty Aline Giraud was absent from the room during the different courses of the meal.
Jim Laurance, the only temperate one in the company, sipped his simple glass of punch sparingly, refusing the bottled stuff and the heavy wines. He felt disgusted and sorry that he had come, but he had money to invest if Simpson's thing suited him, and he settled himself to sit out the revel.
The roadhouse at Indian River had proved a good thing for Laurance. He had struck his Klondike right on that creek, and he was sane enough to know it. Instead of frittering away his coin on fool stampedes in hopes of a mighty strike, he was satisfied to invest it in sound mining securities and watch the dividends slowly grow. Such an enterprise, he hoped, was in Simpson's mind.
Simpson's wine, however, was more in Simpson's thoughts than the enterprise. He had unwisely glutted his taste for beverages with a tang, and he lost control of his manners as well as his senses, laughing boisterously and telling unsavory tales.
"Hi, there!" he would yell, skidding the empty punch-bowl down the table to Jarmand. "Fill her up, Fatty. You're the doctor. Put in something stiff–stiff enough to make your moustache stand! Something d–d stiff, Fatty!"
"That's it, Jarmand," gurgled Bonneaves, a young profligate and an especial chum of Simpson's. "Mix us a regular old hair-raiser. We're out for fun! Who's holding us down?"
"No one! No one!" shouted three or four of the muddled men, stamping on the floor and breaking into confused singing, which set up rumbling echoes through the other parts of the restaurant and went far to disturbing its customers.
"Tell us a story, Simp," said Jarmand. "Old Simp's the boy for spicy ones. Eh, men? You bet your liver-colored notes he is. Rip one off, Simp, there's a good fellow!"
Accordingly Simp ripped one off, a story that convulsed the drinkers but which made Laurance's blood boil. The one-time plainsman, now an Alaskan sourdough, sat very still, without the shadow of a smile upon his face.
Aline Giraud, accompanied by a waitress, an ugly, angular Danish woman, brought in the meats. These were bear steaks, slices of moose flank, and grouse in pairs, a veritable feast which would have fed a hundred poverty-pinched wretches in the outlying camps. The thought came to Laurance as he poised his knife and fork over the breast of a fat grouse dressed with sage dressing in a wonderful brown gravy.