"I don"t care if he was. I"m an old friend of Bill"s, too. And Bill _ain"t_ a thief, no matter what he says!"
"You go to bed this minute. I am surprised and mortified to think that you would be so contemptible as to listen to other people"s affairs."
""Taint any worse than lying!"
The boy stamped angrily from the room, and the girl sat long by the fire and, one by one, fed letters to the flames.
CHAPTER VI
THE CROOKED GAME
"Clickity-click, clickity-click, clickity-click," the monotonous song of the rails told off the miles as the heavy train rushed westward between the endless cornfields of a flat middle State. To the well-built athletic young man who was one of the four occupants of the little end-room, smoking compartment, the outlook was anything but cheerful.
As far as the eye could reach long rows of shriveled husks, from which the season"s crop of yellow ears had been torn, flapped dejectedly against their dried and broken stalks. Here and there a square of rich, black loam, freshly turned, bespoke the forehanded farmer; while in the fields of his neighbors straggling groups of cattle and hogs gleaned half-heartedly in the standing roughage.
"Not much for scenery, is it?" The offensively garrulous pa.s.senger directed his remarks to the young man, who abstractedly surveyed the landscape. "No, sir," he continued, "you"ve got to go West for Scenery.
Ever been West?"
The young man nodded without removing his gaze from the window.
"I live in Colo_ray_do," the other persisted. "Went out there for my health--and I stayed. Johnson"s my name. I"m in the mining business."
His eyes swept the compartment to include the others in the too evident geniality of their glance.
"Now that we"re all acquainted," he ventured--"how about a little game of seven-up, just to pa.s.s away the time? How about you, dad?"
Thus flippantly he addressed the ruddy-faced, middle-aged gentleman in gray tweeds, whose attention was apparently concentrated upon the lengthening ash of his cigar.
With enthusiasm undampened by the curtness of the latter"s refusal, he turned to the remaining pa.s.senger--a youth upon whose lip sprouted a tenderly pruned mustache, so obviously new that it looked itchy.
"How about you, captain?" The top-heavy youth closed his magazine and unlocked a brain-cell.
"I don"t mind." He ostentatiously consulted a very gold watch. "Must be in Chicago this evening," he muttered quite audibly, pulling a ten, twent, thirt frown that caused his l.a.b.i.al foliage to rustle with importance.
He drew from his pocket a card upon which the ink was scarcely dry and handed it to the effervescent Johnson, who read aloud:
Mr. LINCOLN S. TARBEL Munic.i.p.al Investigator
"You see," explained its owner, "it has reached the ears of the managing editor of my paper in South Bend that vice in various forms flourishes in Chicago! Thereupon he immediately sent for me and ordered a sweeping investigation."
Further information was forestalled by the entrance of a suave-mannered individual who introduced himself as a cigar salesman, and who was readily induced to take a hand in the game.
The lightning-like glances that pa.s.sed between the newcomer and the Western Mr. Johnson, while entirely unnoted by the investigator of munic.i.p.al vice, aroused the interest of the athletic young man to the point of a.s.senting to make the fourth. Here, evidently, was something about to be pulled off, and he decided to be actively among those present.
The game progressed through several uneventful deals. Suddenly Johnson, scrutinizing a hand dealt him by the cigar salesman, emitted a low whistle.
"If we were playing poker now I"d have something to say!"
"Oh, I don"t know! I"ve got some poker hand myself," opined the dealer.
"Discard one, to make a five-card hand, and I bet you five dollars I beat you."
"You"re on!" Each produced a bill which he handed to the athletic young man to hold.
"Three eights and a pair of deuces," boasted the Westerner, exposing the full hand upon the board.
"Beats three kings," admitted the other, ruefully laying down his hand.
The winner pocketed the money with an exaggerated wink in the direction of the newspaper youth who had been an interested spectator.
The game progressed, and before many deals another challenge was pa.s.sed and accepted between the two. This time it was the salesman who profited to the extent of twenty-five dollars which he received from the stakeholder with the remark that he would bet his whole roll on a jack full any old day.
The elderly gentleman smoked in silence and amused himself by mentally cataloguing the players. Suddenly his attention became riveted.
What he saw jarred harshly upon his estimate of the athletic young man who, at the conclusion of his deal, dexterously slipped some cards beneath the table from his pile of tricks, then, bunching the pack, pa.s.sed it to the Westerner for the next deal.
He was on the point of exposing this cheap bit of knavery when the young man glanced in his direction. Something in the steady gaze of the gray eyes, though for the life of him he could not have told what, stayed his purpose, and he settled into his seat, more puzzled than before.
"If it had been any one of the others," he thought to himself; "and then to think that he turns around and with a look virtually makes me a party to his tuppenny trickery!"
His reflections were cut short by a sharp exclamation from the investigator of vice who, in spite of his desire to appear composed, was evidently laboring under great excitement.
"I"ll bet twenty-five dollars I"ve got the best poker hand this time!"
He was staring at his tight-gripped cards. Johnson looked his hand over--and with a careless:
"Here"s where I get even," tossed the amount to the athletic young man, who laid his cards upon the table. The cigar salesman broke in:
"Hold on! I"m in on this, too! Got a pretty fair hand myself. And just to show you sports I"m game, I"ll make it a hundred."
He pa.s.sed a handful of bills to the stakeholder and glared defiantly at the newspaper person who was in the act of returning a bill-fold to his pocket.
"Why, that is all I"ve got!" he gasped, "and it"s expense-money!"
"Well, of course," the other replied, "if you don"t care to see my hand, and I don"t mind telling you it"s more than a middling good one----"
"I"ll bet"--the hand that extracted the neatly folded bills from the leather case shook and the voice rose to a ludicrous falsetto--"I"ve got you beat, and if I had any more money with me I"d come back at you."
"You"ve got a watch there," remarked Mr. Johnson. "Let"s see it. I ain"t going to stay for the raise. My three sevens don"t look as good as they did."
"I paid fifty dollars for it!" piped the youth, pa.s.sing the watch across the board. Both men examined it.
"Oh, well, I don"t know anything about watches, but I"ll take your word for it. Stick her up--here"s the fifty."
"I"ve got _four_ aces!" squealed the reporter as he spread them out face upward. He stared wildly at the other, and his hands made wet marks where they touched the board.
"No good," remarked his opponent blandly. "Mine"s hearts--all in a row, with the jack at the top." One by one he laid them down--a straight flush. South Bend stared incredulously at the cards.