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Even the face of bartender Mick, with its stiff unshaven red beard and its single eye, merciless as an electric headlight, its broad flaming scar leading down from the blank socket of its mate, became less repulsive under the softened light.
"Say! yuh want to keep your eyes peeled for Spikes Weber, Irish," remarked the unknown, after two drinks. "He's pawing up the earth whenever he hears your name called. He's sure anxious to see the sod packed down nice on top uh yuh." "So I heard; his nibs here," indicating the bartender, "has been wising me up, a lot. When's the stage due, tomorrow, Oldtimer?"
Who ... or what ... was he? Hanlon went first to the bank, and made out a card for his own box. But once in the vault, and the attendant gone out, it was box 1044 he opened. There was a note for him. "Welcome to Simonides," he read. "My name here is Art Georgopoulis. I work at present as a bartender at the Golden Web, on Thermopylae street.
Some men drinking at the bar ran at break-neck speed; the bartender was wiping a glass and he seemed transfixed to the spot and never moved. I took the cane and broke up the sideboard, which had on it all kinds of intoxicating drinks. Then I ran out across the street to destroy another one.
One of the bar-tenders went up to the schoolmaster's room to bring up a letter, and he found him lying on the bed with his face grey as ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He was stone dead. Life had beaten him. And the strange thing was that the letter that the bartender carried up that morning was from the management of the Louisiana Lottery.
Nodding and smiling at his friends, who thronged about him, standing under the gay lights which reflected from costly oil paintings, Harry King plunged his hand into his pocket to pay the bill, a check for which the bartender had thrust toward him. "Gad, but he's got a wad!" somebody whispered, as King pulled forth a great roll of bills, together with a number of gold and silver coins.
Buck leaned with his broad back against the bar, talking over his shoulder to the bartender, but watching Tenspot Davis, who was assiduously engaged in juggling a handful of Mexican dollars. Up by the door Bigfoot Baker, elated at winning the buck-and-wing contest, was endeavoring to learn a new step, while his late rival was drowning his defeat at Buck's elbow.
He comes to the saloon where I was stayin', they give me a job cleanin' out every day, and he got to talkin' a lot of stuff about scenery and livin' the simple life, and all that guff. The bartender got to jawin' with him, and I laughed, and the bartender hits me a lick side the head. Red, he hits the bartender a lick side of his head and the bartender don't get up right away.
He dealt in that for which he had no use; and the American bartender today who wears his kohinoor and draws the pay of a bank cashier is one who "never touches a drop of anything." The security with which he holds his position is on that very account.
All this he had spoken in a comparatively loud voice, but now, noting that the others had heeded his gesture and had made back towards the bar to drink on the strength of that strange fight between man and beast, the bartender approached his lips close to the ear of the giant. He said in a rapid murmur: "I watched you talking with Dan Barry and I saw Barry's face when he went out.
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