their turn out on the range close by with only men enough in attendance to keep them in hand, the rest being free to taste the delights of town.
Several of these cow guardians were in Poteet's place, and half a dozen or so railroaders, putting dimes in the Swiss music-box, and quarters in the device that sometimes gave up quarters in exchange, running them down to a little pan through a troubled row of brass pegs. Uniformly they were putting strong liquor inside themselves, all quite orderly, and grouped according to their calling, there being no common ground between railroaders and men of the range.
Major Simmons tilted his hat a little more toward his left ear as the bartender came down the long bar to the end they occupied.
"Charley," he said, "I want you to meet our six-hundredth citizen. Mr. Dunham, shake hands with Mr. Mallon. This is a great day for Pawnee Bend!"
"Pleased to know you," Charley Mallon recited perfunctorily, his eye up and down the bar to see that nobody sneaked a drink. "What's yours, Mr. Dunham?"
"Lemon pop," said Bill.
Charley Mallon was about as cheerful-looking as a totem pole, and almost as tall. He was so thin his flesh was blue, so morose and downcast of countenance that he might have been assigned to barkeeping as a penance for his sins in some happier and more honorable station. Not that he had been, for he was a bartender by choice, a drinking bartender of the old frontier school. The look he gave Bill when he placed that
