“Then he gets up, slow and dignified, though
he had enough liquor in him to float a ship.
“‘I been mobbed,’ he says, ’it’s
easy to see that. I come here peaceful and quiet,
and here I been mobbed. But I’m comin’
back, boys, and I ain’t comin’ alone.’
“There was our chance to get him, while he was
walking out of that place without a gun, but somehow
nobody moved for him. He didn’t look none
too easy, even without his shootin’ irons.
Out he goes into the night, and we stood around starin’
at each other. Everybody was upset, except Sally
and Bard.
“He says: ‘Miss Fortune, this is
our dance, I think.’
“‘Excuse me,’ says Sally, ‘I
almost forgot about it.’
“And they started to dance to the piano, waltzin’
around among the tables; the rest of us lit out for
home because we knew that Butch would be on his way
with his gang before we got very far under cover.
But hey, Steve, where you goin’?”
“I’m going to get in on that dance,”
called Nash, and was gone at a racing gallop down
the street.
BLUFF
He found no dance in progress, however, but in the
otherwise empty eating place, which Sally owned and
ran with her two capable hands and the assistance
of a cook, sat Sally herself dining at the same table
with the tenderfoot, the flirt, the horse-breaker,
the tamer of gun-fighters.
Nash stood in the shadow of the doorway watching that
lean, handsome face with the suggestion of mockery
in the eyes and the trace of sternness around the
thin lips. Not a formidable figure by any means,
but since his experiences of the past few days, Nash
was grown extremely thoughtful.
What he finally thought he caught in this most unusual
tenderfoot was a certain alertness of a more or less
hair-trigger variety. Even now as he sat at ease
at the table, one elbow resting lightly upon it, apparently
enwrapped in the converse of Sally Fortune, Nash had
a consciousness that the other might be on his feet
and in the most distant part of the room within a
second.
What he noted in the second instant of his observation
was that Sally was not at all loath to waste her time
on the stranger. She was eating with a truly
formidable conventionality of manner, and a certain
grace with which she raised the ponderous coffee cup,
made of crockery guaranteed to resist all falls, struck
awe through the heart of the cowpuncher. She
was bent on another conquest, beyond all doubt, and
that she would not make it never entered the thoughts
of Nash. He set his face to banish a natural
scowl and advanced with a good-natured smile into
the room.
“Hello!” he called.
“It’s old Steve!” sang out Sally,
and whirling from her chair, she advanced almost at
a run to meet him, caught him by both hands, and led
him to a table next to that at which she had been sitting.
