Pouring out a short drink, he passed the bottle to his comrade.  When Swing had filled Racey took the bottle, drove home the cork with the heel of his hand, and carefully tucked away the bottle in the inner pocket of his vest.

“It won’t ride any too well,” he observed to Swing, “but it ain’t gonna be there a great while, I guess.”

“You bet it ain’t gonna be there a great while!” horned in the outraged bartender.  “You put that bottle back on the bar!”

“Why, I gave you a dollar,” said Racey, nervously, hesitantly, “and you kept the change.  I supposed, of course, you was selling me the bottle.”

“You supposed wrong!” As he spoke the bartender’s right hand moved toward the shelf that Racey knew must be under the top of the bar.  “That dollar was for yore two drinks.”

“You mean to say yo’re charging four bits apiece for those drinks!”

“Shore I am.”  As yet the bartender’s hand had remained beneath the bar top.

“But two bits is the regular price,” objected Racey, weakly.

“Four bits is the price to you,” was the truculent statement, sticking out his chin. “Put that bottle back on the bar!”

As he gave the order his right shoulder hunched upward, and his face set like iron.  He had what is known as a “fighting” face, this Starlight bartender.  It was evident that he banked largely on that face.  It had served him well in the past.

“One dollar is my regular price for a bottle,” Racey said gently as the bartender’s hand suddenly nipped into sight clutching a sixshooter, “but if you want it back, take it.”

Racey’s fingers gripped the bottle-neck and fetched it forth.  But instead of placing it on the top of the bar as requested, he continued the motion, as it were, and smote the bartender across the head with it.  Being a quart bottle and reasonably full of liquid, the bartender’s chin came down with a chug on the bar.  Then he slumped quietly to the floor behind the bar.  The sixshooter relinquished by his nerveless fingers remained on top of the bar between the whiskey glasses.

Racey stared speculatively at the long man and the short man.  They in turn regarded him with something like respect.  The long man wore a drooping, streaky-yellow horseshoe of a moustache dominated by a long and melancholy nose.  Flanking the base of this sorrowful nose was a pair of eyes hard and bright and the palest of blue.

The short man was a blobby-nosed creature, who sported a three days’ growth of red beard and a quid of chewing in the angle of a heavy jaw.  Now he revolved the tobacco with a furtive tongue and spat thickly upon the floor.

Without removing his eyes from the two aforementioned gentlemen Racey reached for the bartender’s gun.  “Hadn’t oughta be trusted with firearms,” he observed, pleasantly, referring to what lay behind the bar.  “Too venturesome.  Yeah.”

He thoughtfully lowered the hammer of the sixshooter and rammed it down to the trigger-guard behind the waistband of his trousers.