PALE ANNIE
Even in Elkhead there were fires this day. In
the Gilead saloon one might have thought that the
liquid heat which the men imbibed would serve in place
of stoves, but the proprietor, “Pale Annie,”
had an eye to form, and when the sky was grey he always
lighted the stove.
“Pale Annie” he was called because his
real name was Anderson Hawberry Sandringham.
That name had been a great aid to him when he was an
undertaker in Kansas City; but Anderson Hawberry Sandringham
had fallen from the straight and narrow path of good
undertakers some years before and he had sought refuge
in the mountain-desert, where most things prosper
except sheriffs and grass. He was fully six inches
more than six feet in height and his face was so long
and pale that even Haw-Haw Langley seemed cheerful
beside the ex-undertaker. In Kansas City this
had been much prized, for that single face could lend
solemnity to any funeral. In Elkhead it was hardly
less of an asset.
People came out of curiosity to see Pale Annie behind
the bar with his tall silk hat—which he
could never bring himself to lay aside—among
the cobwebs of the rafters. They came out of curiosity
and they remained to drink—which is a habit
in the mountain-desert. A travelling drummer
or a patent medicine man had offered Pale Annie a handsome
stake to simply go about with him and lend the sanction
of his face to the talk of the drummer, but Pale Annie
had discovered a veritable philosopher’s stone
in Elkhead and he was literally turning whiskey into
gold.
This day was even more prosperous than usual for Pale
Annie, for the grey weather and the chilly air made
men glad of the warmth, both external and internal,
which Pale Annie possessed in his barroom. His
dextrous hands were never for a moment still at the
bar, either setting out drinks or making change, except
when he walked out and threw a fresh feed into the
fire, and stirred up the ruddy depths of the stove
with a tall poker. It was so long, indeed, that
it might have served even Pale Annie for a cane and
it was a plain untapered bar of iron which the blacksmith
had given him as the price of a drink, on a day.
He needed a large poker, however, for there was only
the one stove in the entire big room, and it was a
giant of its kind, as capacious as a hogshead.
This day Pale Annie kept it red hot, so that the warmth
might penetrate to the door on the one hand and to
the rear of the room where the tables and chairs were,
on the other.
Since Pale Annie’s crowd took little exercise
except for bending their elbows now and again, and
since the majority of them had been in the place fully
half the day, by ten in the evening sounds of hilarity
began to rise from the saloon. Solemn-faced men
who had remained in their places for hour after hour,
industriously putting away the red-eye, now showed
symptoms of life. Some of them discovered hitherto
