He couldn’t find it, so he pushed an old envelope across the desk at me.
“Register on the back of that. Be with us a spell?”
“Most likely.”
A chair upset behind me.
I turned around as a lanky man with enormous red ears reared himself upright with the help of his hands on the table—one of them flat in the plate of ham and eggs he had been eating.
“Ladiesh an’ gentsh,” he solemnly declaimed, “th’ time hash came for yuh t’ give up y’r evil waysh an’ git out y’r knittin’. Th’ law hash came to Orilla County!”
The drunk bowed to me, upset his ham and eggs, and sat down again. The other diners applauded with thump of knives and forks on tables and dishes.
I looked them over while they looked me over. A miscellaneous assortment: weather-beaten horsemen, clumsily muscled laborers, men with the pasty complexions of night workers. The one woman in the room didn’t belong to Arizona. She was a thin girl of maybe twenty-five, with too-bright dark eyes, dark, short hair, and a sharp prettiness that was the mark of a larger settlement than this. You’ve seen her, or her sisters, in the larger cities, in the places that get going after the theatres let out.
The man with her was range country—a slim lad in the early twenties, not very tall, with pale blue eyes that were startling in so dark-tanned a face. His features were a bit too perfect in their clean-cut regularity.
“So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.