Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/94

 doing to keep down the pesky kiotes this season. The afternoon was far spent—and farther the golden double eagles in Woolly Annie's buckskin bag—when regretfully she turned into the Occidental Hotel to get what she termed a wash-up. It was her intention to spend the night in that hostelry; the home ranch on Poison Spider was thirty-three miles out over the tumbling divides, and its mistress had no inclination to wear herself to a shadow by making the distance to town and back between suns.

Meanwhile her presence in Two Moons set certain currents to swirling in quiet places.

It may be said that the ultimate resistant citadel of the cattle clan in Two Moons—so swiftly turning from a cow town into a camp of cowmen's enemies—was the Capitol Saloon, Dad Strayhorn, proprietor. And of that citadel the sacred inner chamber of the clan's elect, always most closely tiled, was a certain upstairs room of furnishings the simplest,—just a green baize covered table with a slot in its exact center, seven chairs, four cuspidors decorated with blue daisy chains about their flaring rims and a sideboard for the accommodation of cigars, strong waters and—on