CHAPTER III

One Way to Drown Sorrow

Ford walked up to the bar, with a smile upon his face which Sam misunderstood and so met with a conciliatory grin and a hand extended toward a certain round, ribbed bottle with a blue-and-silver label.  Ford waved away the bottle and leaned, not on the bar but across it, and clutching Sam by the necktie, slapped him first upon one ear and next upon the other, until he was forced by the tingling of his own fingers to desist.  By that time Sam’s green necktie was pulled tight just under his nose, and he had swallowed his gum—­which, considering the size of the lump, was likely to be the death of him.

Ford did not say a word.  He permitted Sam to jerk loose and back into a corner, and he watched the swift crimsoning of his ears with a keen interest.  Since Sam’s face had the pasty pallor of the badly scared, the ears appeared much redder by contrast than they really were.  Next, Ford turned his attention to the man beside him, who happened to be Bill.  For one long minute the grim spirit of war hovered just over the two.

“Aw, forget it, Ford,” Bill urged ingratiatingly at last.  “You don’t want to lick anybody—­least of all old Bill!  Look at them knuckles!  You couldn’t thump a feather bed.  Anyway, you got the guilty party when you done slapped Sam up to a peak and then knocked the peak off.  Made him swaller his cud, too, by hokey!  Say, Sam, my old dad used to feed a cow on bacon-rinds when she done lost her cud.  You try it, Sam.  Mebby it might help them ears!  Shove that there trouble-killer over this way, Sammy, and don’t look so fierce at your uncle Bill; he’s liable to turn you across his knee and dust your pants proper.”  He turned again to Ford, scowling at the group and at life in general, while the snow melted upon his broad shoulders and trickled in little, hurrying drops down to the nearest jumping-off place.  “Come, drownd your sorrer,” Bill advised amiably.  “Nobody said nothing but Sammy, and I’ll gamble he wishes he hadn’t, now.”  If his counsel was vicious, his smile was engaging—­which does not, in this instance, mean that it was beautiful.

Ford’s fingers closed upon the bottle, and with reprehensible thoroughness he proceeded to drown what sorrows he then possessed.  Unfortunately he straightway produced a fresh supply, after his usual method.  In two hours he was flushed and argumentative.  In three he had whipped Bill—­cause unknown to the chronicler, and somewhat hazy to Ford also after it was all over.  By mid-afternoon he had Sammy entrenched in the tiny stronghold where barreled liquors were kept, and scared to the babbling stage.  Aleck had been put to bed with a gash over his right eye where Ford had pointed his argument with a beer glass, and Big Jim had succumbed to a billiard cue directed first at his most sensitive bunion and later at his head.  Ford was not using his fists, that day, because even in his whisky-brewed rage he remembered, oddly enough, his skinned knuckles.