As he did so two comparatively recent arrivals came up beside him.  They were fresh from a couple of months of range-finding, and they had been quenching a concentrated thirst by concentrated effort.  Haw-Haw Langley looked them over, sighed with relief, and then instantly produced Durham and the brown papers.  He paused in the midst of rolling his cigarette and offered them to the nearest fellow.

“Smoke?” he asked.

Now a man of the mountain-desert knows a great many things, but he does not know how to refuse.  The proffer of a gift embarrasses him, but he knows no way of avoiding it; also he never rests easy until he has made some return.

“Sure,” said the man, and gathered in the tobacco and papers.  “Thanks!”

He covertly dropped the cigarette which he had just lighted, and stepped on it, then he rolled another from Haw-Haw’s materials.  The while, he kept an uneasy eye on his new companion.

“Drinkin’?” he asked at length.

“Not jest now,” said Haw-Haw carelessly.

“Always got room for another,” protested the other, still more in earnest as he saw his chance of a return disappearing.

“All right, then,” said Haw-Haw.  “Jest one more.”

And he poured a glass to the brim, waved it gracefully towards the others without spilling a drop, and downed it at a gulp.

“Ben in town long?” he asked.

“Not long enough to find any action,” answered the other.

The eye of Haw-Haw Langley brightened.  He looked over the two carefully.  The one had black hair and the other red, but they were obviously brothers, both tall, thick-shouldered, square-jawed, and pug-nosed.  There was Irish blood in that twain; the fire in their eyes could have come from only one place on earth.  And Haw-Haw grinned and looked down the length of the room to where Mac Strann sat, a heavy, inert mass, his fleshy forehead puckered into a half-frown of animal wistfulness.

“You ain’t the only ones,” he said to his companion at the bar.  “They’s a man in town who says they don’t turn out any two men in this range that could give him action.”

“The hell!” grunted he of the red hair.  And he looked down to his blunt-knuckled hands.

“’S matter of fact,” continued Haw-Haw easily, “he’s right here now!”

He looked again towards Mac Strann and remembered once more the drink which Mac might so easily have purchased for him.

“It ain’t Pale Annie, is it?” asked the black haired man, casting a dubious glance up and down the vast frame of the undertaker.

“Him?  Not half!” grinned Haw-Haw.  “It’s a fet feller down to the end of the bar.  I guess he’s been drinkin’ some.  Kind of off his nut.”

He indicated Mac Strann.

“He looks to me,” said the red-haired man, setting his jaw, “like a feller that ain’t any too old to learn one more thing about the range in these parts.”