“Can I shave you. Mr. Smiler.” ???

From the pen of ‘Smiler Hales’ – Alfred Arthur Greenwood HALES (1860-1936)

“You can’t whip a mining camp for novelties”. I was walking along Bayley street the other afternoon, feeling like a poet and looking like a tramp out of luck, when I saw a shingle hanging from a tent, which bore the information that Christian or pagan could get a shave inside. Well, I didn’t want a shave ” inside,” but I did want one on the outside, and wanted it badly, so I lined up and waited for my turn, but before my ticket was due the barber’s hand grew weary and he abdicated in favour of a perfect poem in petticoats—the finest looking woman in Coolgardie – when she said sweetly,

“Can I shave you. Mr. Smiler.”

You should have seen me do the distance between the doorway and that chair : never did a mule team strike a corn patch with a greater kind of vim and vigour : and I plainly told the barber that I had no use for “him” talk about hard times—why Bill Adams, the Arizona expert himself, couldn’t tell how hard it was for me to leave that chair.
Fancy coming all the way into the middle of this abode of desolation, this land of “whisky ‘ and wild cat schemers, and thus : – lighting on a spot where you could get shaved by a woman with a face like a spring poet’s dream, and a figure that instinctively brought back memories of my first waltz by moonlight. I’m going there to be shaved regularly, whether the boss carries a, gun Or not !!!