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. Most of them were lounging on the veranda in various attitudes best calculated to rest them from the effects of the overpowering heat of the day. Beasley was lounging with them. For once he seemed to have weakened in his restless energy, or found something of greater interest than that of netting questionable gains.
The latter seemed to be the more likely, for his restless eyes displayed no lack of mental activity. At any rate, he displayed an attitude that afternoon which startled even his bartender. Not once, but several times that individual, of pessimistic mood, had been called upon to dispense free rations of the worst possible liquor in the place, until, driven from wonder to protest, he declared, with emphatic conviction and an adequate flow of blasphemy, addressing himself to the bottles under the counter, the smeary glasses he breathed upon while wiping with a soiled and odoriferous cloth, that the boss was "bug--plumb bug." Nevertheless, his own understanding of "crookedness" warned him that the man had method, and he was anxious to discover the direction in which it was moving. Therefore he watched Beasley's doings with appreciative eyes, and his interest grew as the afternoon waned.
"He's on a crook lay," he told himself after a while. And the thought brightened his outlook upon life, and helped to banish some of his pessimism.
The chief feature of interest for him lay in the fact that the men foregathered were a collection of those who belonged to the "something-for-nothing" class, as he graphically described them. And he observed, too, that Beasley was carefully shepherding them. There were a few of the older hands of the camp, but these seemed to have less interest for his boss. At least he showed far less consideration for them. And it quickly became evident that the whole afternoon's object was the adequate ingratiation and stimulation of these dregs of frontier life.
This the bartender saw quite clearly. For the rest he was content to wait. He had spent most of his life in thus waiting and watching the nefarious schemes of unscrupulous men.
The heat was overpowering. It was almost an effort to breathe, let alone move about. The men lolled, propped against the baulks of timber supporting the veranda roof, stretched out on benches, or crouching on the raised edge of the wooden flooring. One and all were in a state of wiltering in the stewing heat, from which only an intermittent flow of fiery spirit could rouse them.