Herman had resoundingly slapped a hand on the bar in a manner that indeed did slam the proceedings to a halt. Gesturing in rather grand fashion at the long line of beer spigots as everyone watched wide-eyed, he elucidated, “Not all of these wild woolly brewings am I acquainted with. Samples first, please, bar maiden.”
Immediately Deacon was suspiciously accusing Skeeter and Highpockets of trying to pull a fast one by having our man wet his whistle too familiarly before the real taste test, while they hotly argued back that the man was new to Montana and it was essential to the bet for him to learn Babs’s stock first so he’d have comparisons to go on. I could not deny the logic—even Pooch delivered “Damn straight” in recognition of it—but was leery of how much more beer Herman was taking aboard before the drinks that counted. I did not even know enough then to have the bigger worry, that in the era when almost every Montana city had its own brewery, the brewers almost to a man were of German origin, leading to a certain sameness of product. It had been nearly thirty years since Herman was testing steins of beer in Munich; did his sense of taste have that much memory of the Germanic tricks of the trade, such as they were?
We were about to find out, because Deacon and his side grudgingly gave in, and Babs, smiling to herself at all the fresh commerce, set up half a dozen shot glasses. As she named off each beer, I as our chosen representative in this—Highpockets was firm that Herman savvied me better than anyone else and we wanted no monkey business in making the individual beers known to him—wrote each on a cash register slip and put it facedown under the respective brew. Highlander, out of Missoula. Kessler from Helena. Great Falls Select. The beer from Butte, baldly named Butte Beer. Billings Yellowstone Brew. Anaconda Avalanche Ale.
Unsteady but unconcerned, Herman winked at me with his glass eye, wrapped a hand around the first shot glass, unleashed the toast “The Devil’s eyedrops cure sorrow!” and lifted the Great Fall Select to his lips.
Eyes half-shut in concentration as I called out the name of each one, he sipped his way through the preliminary beers. When he was done and jovially declared that Montana beer at least was better than the product of any horse, as quick as the laughter died down Skeeter flapped some money under Deacon’s nose and flopped it down on the bar as the start of the pot. “Now, about them bets, if ye haven’t lost your nerve.”
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EXPERIENCE SOMETIMES lives up to its reputation as a teacher. From my time of hanging around the Double W bunkhouse and its card sharks, I was keeping an eye on Midnight Frankie. When he stayed perfectly poker-faced but flipped a nice fresh twenty-dollar bill into the pot—a lot of money, on our wages—saying, “Let’s get some skin in the game,” I tremblingly stroked the arrowhead pouch for luck and dug out twenty dollars from the front of my pants and secured the same from Herman’s change lying on the bar without him noticing. Nor was I the only one following Midnight Frankie’s lead. Highpockets thumbed out the sum with the declaration “I’m in for a double sawbuck, too,” and Harv, thinking it over for a moment, silently did the same, followed in quick succession by Peerless, Shakespeare, Fingy, and Pooch.
“There’s our chunk of the jackpot, Deacon,” Skeeter crowed in challenge. “Decorate the mahogany or say uncle.”
Faced with our crew’s total backing of Herman, the Tumbling T outfit looked uneasily at one another, but when Deacon demanded, “C’mon, don’t let this gang of broken-down blanket stiffs buffalo us,” they all matched our bets. Just like that, nearly three hundred dollars lay in a green pile on the bar.
“All right, One Eye, hoist ’em and name ’em off,” Skeeter led the roof-raising chorus of encouragement from our side. But before Babs could move to the taps to repeat the beers, Deacon stopped her and everything else with a shrill two-fingered whistle, evidently a hobo signal for something like stop, look, and listen.
In the immediate silence, the Tumbling T chieftain swelled up with the full attention he had drawn and sprang his demand. “Nothing against PeeWee here”—that again! I could have been put on trial for the murderous look I gave him—“but I want to handle them shot glasses and slips of paper myself, starting behind there at the taps. Just so there’s no wrong impression of anything funny taking place along the way. You mind, Babs?”