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 No, he couldn't fight them all, as Moore had said. That being the case, he wouldn't fight any of them, no matter if the joke followed him around the globe. They seemed to think the joke was on him, as if he, and not the poor fool of a fittified man, had said it. Damn fools!

This thought, this denunciation, was in his mind when he looked up into the worldly eyes of the waiting lady. She grinned in another style, the placative, trade-winning style, rubbing what might have been her wedding ring with her apron, as if to call his attention to the fact that she was a perfectly honest woman, and neutral on all public questions as the sun.

"Make it steak and p'taters," Bill said.

There was only one other customer in the place, a muscular brown man whose freshly barbered hair and beard were pretty well salted with gray. He was a decorous grave man, who had not even turned his head at Puckett's taunt. He was dressed as men who rode the range commonly went about in summer weather, trousers in his boots, gray woolen shirt unbuttoned at his throat. His belt and pistol hung on the back of his chair, his sombrero on the wall. Dunham had taken inventory of him as he passed on to the table where he sat, reaching the instant conclusion that this man was nobody's hired hand.

This customer was also waiting to be served, evidently having come in only a little ahead of Dunham. He was still eating when Bill went out, in a deliberately dignified way which Bill thought was the kind of table conduct one expected of a man of his years, but did not