He was staring in earnest, now, and instinctively reached for the gun in his back-pocket, though he did not draw it. The stranger had approached the poker-players, and stood over them, his big, empty hands outspread upon the table before them.
The men whom he had interrupted looked up in surprise. The prospectors who had been discussing the Peg-leg suddenly became silent. The dominoe-players ceased the rattle of their game and stared. A hush was upon the whole room, a tense feeling of pending excitement. One or two men instinctively measured their own distance from the door, and from the center of coming activities. Jim Bracton stared open-mouthed from behind his bar.
“Who is the feller?” he demanded. “Friend o’ yourn, Larch?”
“Not that I knows,” was the foreman’s reply. “I never saw him before, but I’m sure willin’ to sit in to any game where he holds a hand.”
He started forward, ready to draw on the instant, but the stranger seemed not to see him. He had gathered the eyes of the poker-players in his own indignant gaze, and now addressed them collectively:
“Gentlemen,” he said, quietly, “you ought not to be doing this.”
“Glory be!” groaned Sandy Larch under his breath, “now wha’ d’ you think o’ that fer a simple speech?”
The astounded men to whom Gard spoke sat silent, not one of them making a move. They were held spell-bound by the gentle quality of his fearlessness.
“Somebody ’s been breaking the law, and selling this Indian whiskey,” Gard went on, in a matter-of-fact tone. “It was a mighty bad thing to do, and you are doing something a heap wickeder. He is drunk now, and he doesn’t rightly sense what he’s doing. You ought not to play cards with him. You’re drinking his liquor and helping him to get drunker; and—you’re cheating him, out of his money.”
The big wheel-of-fortune had ceased to whirr now, and the silence of the room was broken only by a snarling question from one of the men Gard had addressed.