“Well, here’s lukin’ at you, since in the way of a frind there’s nothing better to look at!” and Costigan drained a tin cup at Texas Tyler.
“Your very good health,” said Texas, who was somewhat embarrassed by what was regarded as Costigan’s “floweriness.”
“Begorra, is that Hinderson or the ghost av the b’y?” Costigan’s roving eye was arrested by the foreman of the “XXX,” who stood drinking with two or three men of his outfit. He was pale and ill-looking. He drank several times in succession, as if he needed the stimulant, and without the formality of drinking to any one. The two or three “XXX” men who were with him seemed to be equally in need of restoratives.
They talked of the cattle stampede in which several of the outfits had been heavy losers. Some nine hundred head of cattle had been recovered, and members of the different outfits were still scouring the Red Desert for strays.
Something in the nature of a sensation was created by the arrival of the Wetmore party. The women were frankly interested in the clothes, bearing, and general deportment of the New-Yorkers. Rumors of Miss Colebrooke’s beauty were rife, and there was a general inclination to compare her with local belles. Such exotic types—they had seen these city beauties before—were as a rule too colorless for their appreciation. They liked faces that had “more go to them,” was the verdict passed upon one famous beauty who had visited the Wetmores the year before. In arrangement of the hair, perhaps, in matters of dress, the judges were willing to concede the laurels to city damsels, but there concession stopped. But evidently Kitty, to judge from the elaboration of her toilet, did not intend to be dismissed thus cursorily. She herself was delicately, palely pretty, as always, but her hair was tortured to a fashionable fluffiness, and the simplicity of her green muslin gown was only in the name. It was muslin disguised, elaborated, beribboned, lace-trimmed till its identity was all but lost in the multitude of pretty complications.
“Did you know that old Ma’am Yellett had a school-marm up to her place?” asked one of the men, apropos of Eastern prettiness.
“Well, well,” Costigan reminisced, “’tis some av thim Yillitt lambs thot’s six fut in their shtockings, if Oi be rimimbering right. Sure, the tacher ought to be something av a pugilist, Oi’m thinkin’.”