to find a fire and an
easy chair and something cheering to drink while he waited for the
pinto team to rest and eat, he found a sleepy bartender sprawled
before the stove, a black-and-white dog stretched flat on its side and
growling while it dreamed, and an all-pervading odor of alcoholic
beverages that appealed to him.

"A highball would make me happy, right now," he announced cheerfully,
standing over the bartender, rubbing his fingers numbed from the keen
air and from holding in the pintos, to which a slackened pull on the
bits meant a tacit consent to a headlong run.

"Been to the dance?" The bartender yawned widely and went to mix the
highball. "I been kinda waitin' up--but shucks! No tellin' when the
crowd'll git in--not if they drink all they took with 'em."

"They were working hard to do just that when I left." Lance stood back
to the stove. Having left in a hurry, without his overcoat, he was
chilled to the bone, though the night had been mild for that time of
the year. He hoped that the girl had not been uncomfortable--and
yawned while the thought held him. He drank his highball, warmed
himself comfortably and then, with some one's fur overcoat for a
blanket, he disposed his big body on a near-by pool table, never
dreaming that Mary Hope Douglas was remembering his tone, his words,
his silence even; analyzing, weighing, wondering how much he had
meant, or how little,--wondering whether she really hated him, whether
she might justly call her ponderings by any name save curiosity. Such
is the way of women the world over.

What Lance thought does not greatly matter. Such is the way of men
that their thoughts sooner or later crystallize into action. The
bartender would tell you that he went straight to sleep, with the fur
coat pulled up over his ears and his legs uncovered, his modishly-shod
feet extending beyond the end of the table. The bartender dozed in his
chair, thinking it not worth while to close up, because the dance
crowd might come straying in at any time with much noise and a great
thirst, to say nothing of the possibility of thirsty men coming on the
midnight freight that was always four or five hours late, and was now
much overdue.

The freight arrived. Three men entered the saloon, drank whisky,
talked for a few minutes and departed. The bartender took a long,
heat-warped poker and attacked the red clinkers in the body of the
stove, threw in a bucket of fresh coal, used the poker with good