A fair boy, the dreamer, the poet, went back to a bunk against the further wall, where the bar-keeper's bull-dog lay sleeping in his blankets, and put his arms about his neck, and put his face down and remained there a long time. Perhaps he wept. Was he weeping for joy or for sorrow?
There was a great big grizzly head moved out of the crowd and up to the bar. The head rolled on the shoulders from side to side, as if it was not very firmly fixed there, and did not particularly care at this particular time whether it remained there or not. A big fist fell like a stone on the bar. The glasses jumped as if frightened half to death; they ran up against each other, and clinked and huddled together there, and fairly screamed and split their sides in their terror. A big mouth opened behind an awful barricade of beard, again the big fist fell down, again the glasses screamed and clinked with terror, and the head rolled sidewise again, and the big mouth opened again, and the big voice said:
"By the bald-headed Elijah!" and that was all.
Then there was another calm, and you might have heard the little brown wood-mice nibbling at the old boots, and leather belts, and tin cans stowed away among the other rubbish up in the loft of the Howling Wilderness.
Then the fist came down again, and the big mouth opened, and the big mouth said, slow and loud, and long and savage, like the growl of a grizzly:
"Swaller my grandmother's boots!" Then the man fell back and melted into the crowd; and whatever romance there was in his life, whatever sentiment he may have had, whatever poetry there was pent up in the heart of this great Titan, it found no other expression than this.
The genteel gambler, who sat behind a table with its green cloth and silver faro-box, forgot to throw his card, but held his arm poised in the air till any man could have seen the Jack of Clubs, though a thousand dollars' worth of gold-dust depended on the turn.
Yet all this soon had an end, of course, and there was a confusion of tongues, and a noise that settled gradually over against the bar. Even then, it was afterwards remarked, though the men really interested did not know it at the time, that the cinnamon-headed dealer of drinks put cayenne pepper in a gin cocktail and Scheidam schnapps in a Tom and Jerry.