Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Read Online Free PDF Page B

Doc mused, and sent a few ounces of Scotch past an angelic smile.
    “You’ve galvanized us all once again, Doc,” said Noah immediately.
    “Socket to me,” I agreed enthusiastically.
    The Doc made a face, no great feat considering what he had to work with, and glared at me. “Wire you debasing this contest with slang?” he intoned.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” interceded Noah. “It seems like an acceptable current usage to me.”
    “You see, Doc?” I said desperately, beginning to feel the strain now, “Noah and I seem tube be in agreement.”
    But Doc Webster wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t even looking in my, direction. He was staring fixedly over Noah’s right shoulder. “I regret to inform you all,” he said with the utmost calm, “that the gent at the bar is not packing a lightning rod.”
    About thirty heads spun around at once, and sure enough, there was a guy in front of the bar with a .45 automatic in his hand, and Callahan was staring equably into the medicine end. He was holding out a salt-shaker in his huge horny fist.
    “What’s that for?” the gunman demanded.
    “Might as well salt that thing, son. You’re about to eat it.
     
    Now your run-of-the-mill stickup artist would react to a line like that by waving the rod around a little, maybe even picking off the odd bottle behind the bar. This fellow just looked more depressed.
    He didn’t look like a stickup artist if it came to that; I’d have taken him for an insurance salesman down on his luck. He was short, slight and balding, and his goldrimmed glasses pinched cruelly at his nose. His features were utterly nondescript, a Walter Mitty caricature of despair, and I couldn’t help remembering that some of our more notable assassins have been Walter Mitty types.
    Then I saw Fast Eddie over at the piano slide his hand down to his boot for the little blackjack he carries for emergencies, and began trying to remember if my insurance was paid up. The scrawny gunman locked eyes with Callahan, holding the cannon steady as a rock, and Callahan smiled.
    “Want a drink to wash it down with?” he asked.
    The guy with the gun ran out of determination all at once and lowered the piece, looking around him vaguely. Callahan pointed to the fireplace, and the guy nodded thanks. The gun described a lazy arc and landed in the pile of glass with a sound like change rattling in a pocket.
    You might almost have thought the gun had shattered a window that kept out a storm, but the whooshing sound that followed was really only the noise of a couple dozen guys all exhaling at the same time. Fast Eddie’s hand slid back up his leg, and Callahan said softly, “You forgot the toast, friend.”
    I expected that to confuse the guy, but it seemed he knew something about Callahan’s Place after all, because he just nodded and made his toast.
    “To progress.”
    I could see people all up and down the bar firing up their guessers, but nobody opened his trap. We waited to see if the guy felt like telling us what his beef with progress was, and when you understand that you will have gone a long way toward understanding what Callahan’s Place is all about. I’m sure anywhere else folks’d figure that a man who’d just waved a gun around owed ‘em an explanation, if not a few teeth. We just sat there looking noncommittal and hoping he’d let it out.
    He did.
    “I mean, progress is something with no pity and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew and spits out things you can’t understand and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money. What the hell is the sense of progress anyway?”
    “Keeps the dust off ya,” said Slippery Joe Maser seriously. Now Joe, as you know, has two wives, and there sure as hell ain’t no dust on him.
    “I suppose you’re right,” said the clerical-looking burglar, “but I’d surely appreciate a little dust just at the moment. I was hip-deep in it for years, and I didn’t know how