Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/24

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10
BEACHED KEELS

"Well," thought Archer, looking into this hillside barroom, where through the gray smoke-layers the figures of men moved tipsily, "I've found plenty of it."

His entrance no one noticed. A snarled group swayed in midfloor, three men pawing one another's shoulders, in an effort to light their pipes from a single match. There was no talk, no sound but the shifting of feet. Other men, ill-favored, sprawled in a half-stupor on a bench that edged the room. On the bar, in the light of the tin reflector behind the lamp, stood the phonograph, silent, its conical throat yawning. A mean little man in a dirty shirt—evidently bartender—had stooped to pitch something out of a window into the yellow grass that waved flush with the window sill and rose on the abrupt slope of the hillside: an easy exit in the event of a raid.

"Where 'd the city guy blow in frum?" mumbled a voice. "Look at ut, would ye? Say, this ain't Camperbeller ner Baw Hawber." Mischief was in the voice and the thick laughter.