. "Not Baby Bunting? Oh, Lord! and I promised
to give you an adult weapon!--the kind they're wearing now by way of
full-dress."

"Talkin' secrets, boss?" said Half-past Full.

The well-meaning Sam filled his cup, and this proceeding shifted the
buccaroo's truculent attention.

"What's that mud?" he demanded.

"Coffee," said Sam, politely.

The buccaroo swept his cup to the ground, and the next man howled
dismay.

"Burn your poor legs?" said Half-past. He poured his glass over the
victim. They wrestled, the company pounded the table, betting hoarsely,
until Half-past went to the floor, and his plate with him.

"Go easy," said Drake. "You're smashing the company's property."

"Bald-headed china for sure, boss!" said a second of the brothers
Drinker, and dropped a dish.

"I'll merely tell you," said Drake, "that the company don't pay for this
china twice."

"Not twice?" said Half-past Full, smashing some more. "How about
thrice?"

"Want your money now?" another inquired.

A riot of banter seized upon all of them, and they began to laugh and
destroy.

"How much did this cost?" said one, prying askew his three-tined fork.

"How much did you cost yourself?" said another to Drake.

"What, our kid boss? Two bits, I guess."

"Hyas markook. Too dear!"

They bawled at their own jokes, loud and ominous; threat sounded beneath
their lightest word, the new crashes of china that they threw on the
floor struck sharply through the foreboding din of their mirth. The
spirit that Drake since his arrival had kept under in them day by day,
but not quelled, rose visibly each few succeeding minutes, swelling
upward as the tide does. Buoyed up on the whiskey, it glittered in their
eyes and yelled mutinously in their voices.

"I'm waiting all orders," said Bolles to Drake.

"I haven't any," said Drake. "New ones, that is. We've sat down to see
this meal out. Got to keep sitting."

He leaned back, eating deliberately, saying no more to the buccaroos;
thus they saw he would never leave the room till they did. As he had
taken his chair the first, so was the boy bound to quit it the last. The
game of prying fork-tines staled on them one by one, and they took to
songs, mostly of love and parting. With the red whiskey in their eyes
they shouted plaintively of sweethearts, and vows, and lips, and meeting
in the wild wood. From these they went to ballads of the cattle-trail
and the Yuba River, and so inevitably worked to the o