The Stove
A stove (heater) in a story normally functions narratively as a symbol of protective warmth from the cold outside and the comfort of domestication. In this case, however, the stove is more an ironic symbolic in which its protective qualities is on the verge of an incendiary explosion that will annihilate all claims to the comforts of domestication.
"This registers the amount of your purchase."
The motto situated atop the cash register in the saloon takes on tragic irony with the image presented by the author of the Swede’s cold, dead eyes seemingly registering its corrosively cruel message as his corpse lies alone and unattended.
The Swede's Suspicions
The Easterner muses that the Swede’s psychologically out-of-sync behavior is due to arriving in the west after having read too many romanticized accounts in dime novels. As a result, he expects things to be like they are in these novels; where danger lurks behind every draw of the cards or brush of the holster. The only problem is that inside the hotel, the card game is played just for fun and nobody is even wearing a holster. If the Easterner is right—and it is only his theory one can go on—then the Swede has shown up expecting things to suddenly get dangerous and violent so the meat of the story cuts along two planes of irony: the real west is nothing like the Swede expects to find AND it is more dangerous.
Except that...
Some time after central events, the Cowboy and the Easterner meet again and discuss the events with the Cowboy musing that the Swede would still be alive today if only he hadn’t done one thing: accuse Johnnie Scully of cheating. Such an explanation would surely make it much easier to deal with the way things turned out for the Cowboy, except that…Johnnie Scully was cheating, according to the Easterner.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The ultimately irony of the story is that the Swede’s early inexplicable assertion “"These men are going to kill me” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether, as the Easterner surmises, the Swede’s pathology is circumscribed by reading too many dime novels or not, he arrives already predisposed to suspicion and paranoia. In turn, he reacts with suspicion that spreads the paranoia outward in the process he manages to transform what is to all outward appearances a perfectly average evening with perfectly average people into scene from a dime novel.
