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"Evenin', Padre," he said, with a cordiality the most exacting could have found no fault with. "Good-evening," replied the newcomer, smiling pleasantly as he glanced round the sordid hovel. Then he added: "Times are changed, sure. But where are your customers?" Beasley's quick eyes gazed sharply at the perfect mask of disarming geniality.
"Never mind that foolishness," he snapped. "You see, Cy, Debby had just been out to Arizona visitin' old Beasley's niece. And she'd fell in with a woman out there whose husband had run off and left her. And Debby, she read the advertisement about him in the Arizona paper, and it said he had the spring halt in his off hind leg, or somethin' similar.
A faint perplexity manifested itself upon Beasley's face at this, a shadow which cleared at once when I asked if I might not be permitted to meet these personages, remarking that I had heard from Dowden of Bill Hammersley, though until now a stranger to the fame of Mr. Corley Linbridge.
They called him Las Las Vegas. I liked his looks." "Humph! You'll like him a heap when you know him. He's kept the ranch goin' for Miss Helen all along. But the deal's comin' to a head. Beasley's got thick with thet Riggs. You remember him?" "Yes." "Wal, he's been hangin' out at Pine all winter, watchin' for some chance to get at Miss Helen or Bo. Everybody's seen thet.
And in their wake came all that class of carrion which is ever seeking something for nothing. But the final brand of lawlessness was set on the camp by the arrival of a number of jaded, painted women, who took up their abode in a disused shack sufficiently adjacent to Beasley's store to suit their purposes. It was all very painful, all very deplorable.
"Ther's sure bats roostin' in your belfry, Ike." The boy jumped round on the instant. His good-nature could stand the jibes of his comrades generally, but Beasley's sneers neither he nor any one else could endure. "Who's that yappin'?" the youngster cried, glowering into the speaker's face. "That the feller Buck called an outlaw passon?" he demanded. His right hand slipped to the butt of his gun.
Especially he laughed with a great laughter at the picture of Beasley's coming down at four in the morning to open the door for nothing on sea or land or in the waters under the earth. "So I expect you must have decided," he chuckled, when I concluded, "that David Beasley has gone just plain, plum insane." "Not a bit of it. Nobody could look at him and not know better than that."
"An' my mind's made up," he jerked out at last, with concentrated force. Then he added with an abrupt softening, "Let's eat, Padre. I was forgettin'. Mebbe you're hungry some." An unusual number of horses were tethered at the posts outside Beasley's saloon, and, a still more unusual thing, their owners, for the most part, were not in their usual places within the building.
While this lasted, all of Beasley's trousers were, as Dowden said, "a sight." For that matter, Dowden himself was quite hoarse in court from growling so much. The bears were dismissed abruptly: Bill Hammersley and Mr. Corley Linbridge and Simpledoria came trooping back, and with them they brought that wonderful family, the Hunchbergs.
"Some day I want to take you over next door," he said, cordially, as I came up. "You ought to know Beasley, especially as I hear you're doing some political reporting. Dave Beasley's going to be the next governor of this state, you know." He laughed, offered me a cigar, and we sat down together on the front steps. "From all I hear," I rejoined, "YOU ought to know who'll get it."
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