The new-comer regarded none of them. He poured his glass slowly full, sipped from it, and holding it in his hand, turned and glanced deliberately about the place. He looked at everybody in the room, suddenly sensible of the hostile atmosphere, with what seemed a careless amusement. Then he raised his glass. "Will you join me, gentlemen?" he said. There was but one response. A soiled, shambling figure, blear, white-haired and hesitating, with a battered violin under its arm, slouched from a corner and grasped eagerly for the bottle the bartender contemptuously pushed toward him. No one else moved. The man who waited studied the roomful with a disdainful smile, with eyes sparkling like steel points. He as wholly misunderstood their dislike as they misconstrued his effrontery--did not guess that to them he stood as one whom they had known and had good reason to despise. Their attitude struck him as so manifestly unreasonable and absurd--so primarily the sulky hatred of the laborious boor for the manifestly more flippant member of society--that it diverted him. He had drunk at bar-rooms in many strange places; never before had he encountered a community like this. His veiled, insolent smile swept the room. "A spirit of brotherhood almost Christian!" he said. "If I observe that the town's brandy is of superior vintage to its breeding, let me not be understood as complimenting the former without reservation. I have drunk better brandy; I have never seen worse manners!" He looked smilingly at the soiled figure beside him--a fragment of flotsam tossed on the tide of failure. "I erred in my general salutation," he said. "Gentility is, after all, less a habit than an instinct." He lifted his glass--to the castaway. "I drink to the health of the only other gentleman present," he said, and tossed the drink off. A snort and a truculent shuffle came from the standing men. Their faces were dark. Tom Felder, the lawyer, entered the saloon just in time to see big Devlin, the owner of the corner dance-hall, rise from a table, rolling up flannel sleeves along tattooed arms. He saw him stride forward and, with a well-directed shove, send the shambling inebriate reeling across the floor. "Two curs at the bar are enough at a time!" quoth Devlin. Then the lawyer saw an extraordinary thing. The emptied glass rang sharply on the bar, the arm that held it straightened, the lithe form behind it seemed to expand--and the big bulk of Devlin went backward through the doorway, and collapsed in a sprawling heap on the pavement. "For my part," said an even, infuriate voice from the threshold, "I prefer but one."