To a man like Reed Cassidy, that omission was its own kind of insult. And insults in Cassidy's Deadwood always came with a bill attached.
"You," Cassidy called out, loud enough to still half the room's conversation. "Old-timer in the corner. You know who's sitting twenty feet from you?"
The old man lifted his eyes, unhurried, and said nothing at all, which only widened Cassidy's grin. He rose from his table and crossed the room with the easy swagger of a man who'd never once had that swagger seriously tested, boots loud on the plank floor, the crowd parting and closing behind him the way water parts and closes around a stone.
"Fastest gun from here to Cheyenne," Cassidy said, stopping at the table, looking down with the particular contempt certain men reserve for anybody who fails to be afraid of them quickly enough. "And you don't even have the manners to look impressed."
"Didn't realize impressing you was part of the price of coffee," the old man said.
The room went very quiet. Near the bar, a glass stopped mid-pour.
Cassidy's grin didn't move, but something behind his eyes went flat and hard—the look of a man recalculating a situation he'd assumed was already settled. He reached back without looking, lifted a full glass of whiskey off the nearest table, and turned it slowly over the old man's head.
The whiskey ran through silver stubble and dripped off the worn brim of his hat, soaking into his collar. The old man didn't flinch, didn't blink, didn't so much as shift his hands from where they rested flat on the table. He kept his eyes on Cassidy's face, steady, reading every line of a man he hadn't seen in eight years, the way another man might read a page he'd been waiting a very long time to finish.
The saloon erupted into laughter, the ugly kind a crowd produces when it's relieved not to be the one currently being humiliated.