Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
Two bartenders, one with a huge crest of hair waved back, and the other with his parted in the middle, plastered low and curled at the ends, betokened diverse taste in barbering. A Chinese was giving the last polish to a huge pile of glasses, thick and heavy.
Agreeable and ingratiating storekeepers who sold him groceries, picks, shovels, powder, drills, at fifty per cent. profit, neat, smooth-shaven gamblers, bartenders, who welcomed him with boisterous camaraderie, tired and respectable women who "run" boarding houses, painted, highly-perfumed ladies of the dance hall, enigmatic Chinamen, all were types with which he was familiar.
"Them galliwampuses has fins on their backs, and eighteen toes. This here is a hicklesnifter. It lives under the ground and eats cherries. Don't stand so close to it. It wipes out villages with one stroke of its prehensile tail." Sam, the cosmopolite, who called bartenders in San Antone by their first name, stood in the door. He was a better zoologist.
After another drink he conceived the brilliant plan of selling the stock to the bartenders along Lexington Avenue. This occupied several hours, for it was necessary to take a few drinks in each place in order to get the proprietor in the proper frame of mind to talk business. But the bartenders one and all contended that if they had any money to buy bonds they would not be bartenders.
A golden twenty dollar coin spun and winked upon the bar impelled by Jim's big fingers and Kendric's voice called heartily: "I'd be happy to have every man here drink with me." The invitation was naturally accepted. The men ranged along the bar, elbow to elbow; the bartenders served and, with a nod toward the man who stood treat, poured their own red wine.
He rubbed elbows with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his first name, the policemen, the night detail, were familiar with his face, the drivers of the nighthawks recognized his figure by the street lamps, paling in the light of many an early dawn.
There must have been a suicidal accent to my laughter, for the bartender looked at me with some concern. I called for another brandy and shot the soda into it myself. I watched the foam evaporate, "Ha, ha, ha!" "Hard luck?" the bartender asked sympathetically. "Yes," said I. I seemed to be speaking to several bartenders who looked at me with several varieties of compassion.
The saloons were doing well enough, apparently, from the number that streamed in through their airlock entrances. But Gordon saw one of the bartenders paying money to a thickset person with an arrogant sneer; he knew then that the few profits from the cheap beer were never going home with the man.
It is true that she introduced an element of sadness in the evening when she played "Home, Sweet Home," and "Way Down upon the Swanee River," reducing even the bartenders and hold-up men almost to tears. But possibly a touch of the serious lends a pleasant contrast to merriment.
Only behind the bar the white-aproned bartenders wiped their glasses with apparent imperturbability, their eyes, however, on their brass knuckles hanging just beneath the counter, their ears pricked up for the riot call. The gambler pretended to deliberate, his cool, shifty eyes running over the group before him. A small door immediately behind him swung slowly ajar an inch or so.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking