He said this all the time. At Christmas he said Happy Halloween.
There was a tenor in the bar who was highly respected by everyone; Denver Doll had insisted that I meet him and I was trying to avoid it; his name was D'Annunzio or some such thing.
His wife was with him.
They sat sourly at a table.
There was also some kind of Argentinian tourist at the bar.
Rawlins gave him a shove to make room; he turned and snarled.
Rawlins handed me his glass and knocked him down on the brass rail with one punch.
The man was momentarily out.
There were screams; Tim and I scooted Rawlins out.
There was so much confusion the sheriff couldn't even thread his way through the crowd to find the victim.
Nobody could identify Rawlins.
We went to other bars.
Major staggered up a dark street.
"What the hell's the matter?
Any fights?
Just call on me."
Great laughter rang from all sides.
I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it.
In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land.
We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess – across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.
Rawlins insisted on going back to the bar where he'd fought.
Tim and I didn't like it but stuck to him.
He went up to D'Annunzio, the tenor, and threw a highball in his face.
We dragged him out.
A baritone singer from the chorus joined us and we went to a regular Central City bar.
Here Ray called the waitress a whore.
A group of sullen men were ranged along the bar; they hated tourists.
One of them said,
"You boys better be out of here by the count of ten."
We were.
We staggered back to the shack and went to sleep.
In the morning I woke up and turned over; a big cloud of dust rose from the mattress.
I yanked at the window; it was nailed.
Tim Gray was in the bed too.
We coughed and sneezed.
Our breakfast consisted of stale beer.
Babe came back from her hotel and we got our things together to leave.
Everything seemed to be collapsing.
As we were going out to the car Babe slipped and fell flat on her face.
Poor girl was overwrought.
Her brother and Tim and I helped her up.
We got in the car; Major and Betty joined us.
The sad ride back to Denver began.
Suddenly we came down from the mountain and overlooked the great sea-plain of Denver; heat rose as from an oven.
We began to sing songs.
I was itching to get on to San Francisco.
10
That night I found Carlo and to my amazement he told me he'd been in Central City with Dean.
"What did you do?"
"Oh, we ran around the bars and then Dean stole a car and we drove back down the mountain curves ninety miles an hour."