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 old coast song, made of three languages, with its verses rhymed on each year since the first beginning. Tradition laid it heavy upon each singer in his turn to keep the pot a-boiling by memory or by new invention, and the chant went forward with hypnotic cadence to a tune of larkish, ripping gayety. He who had read over his old stained letters in the homesick afternoon had waked from such dreaming and now sang: 'Once jes' onced in the year o' 49, I met a fancy thing by the name o' Keroline; I never could persuade her for to leave me be; She went and she took and she married me.'
His neighbor was ready with an original contribution: 'Once, once again in the year o' '64, By the city of Whatcom down along the shore— I never could persuade them for to leave me be— A Siwash squaw went and took and married me.'
