Just then the door opened a little roughly, and a man entered slowly whom Keith knew intuitively to be Mr. Bill Bluffy himself. He was a young, brown-bearded man, about Keith's size, but more stockily built, his flannel shirt was laced up in front, and had a full, broad collar turned over a red necktie with long ends. His slouch-hat was set on the back of his head. The gleaming butts of two pistols that peeped out of his waistband gave a touch of piquancy to his appearance. His black eyes were restless and sparkling with excitement. He wavered slightly in his gait, and his speech was just thick enough to confirm what his appearance suggested, and what he was careful to declare somewhat superfluously, that he was "on a ---- of a spree."
"I am a-huntin' for a ---- furriner 'at I promised to run out of town before to-morrow mornin'. Is he in here!" He tried to stand still, but finding this difficult, advanced.
A pause fell in the conversation around the stove. Two or three of the men, after a civil enough greeting, hitched themselves into a more comfortable posture in their chairs, and it was singular, though Keith did not recall it until afterwards, that each of them showed by the movement a pistol on his right hip.
After a general greeting, which in form was nearer akin to an eternal malediction than to anything else, Mr. Bluffy walked to the bar. Resting himself against it, he turned, and sweeping his eye over the assemblage, ordered every man in the room to walk up and take a drink with him, under penalties veiled in too terrific language to be wholly intelligible. The violence of his invitation was apparently not quite necessary, as every man in the room pulled back his chair promptly and moved toward the bar, leaving Keith alone by the stove. Mr. Bluffy had ordered drinks, when his casual glance fell on Keith standing quietly inside the circle of chairs on the other side of the stove. He pushed his way unsteadily through the men clustered at the bar.
"Why in the ---- don't you come up and do what I tell you? Are you deaf?"
"No," said Keith, quietly; "but I'll get you to excuse me."
"Excuse ----! You aren't too good to drink with me, are you? If you think you are, I'll show you pretty ----d quick you ain't."
Keith flushed.
"Drink with him," said two or three men in an undertone. "Or take a cigar," said one, in a friendly aside.
"Thank you, I won't drink," said Keith, yet more gravely, his face paling a little, "and I don't care for a cigar."