“What in hell o’ your business is it?”
“It’s every man’s business when another man breaks the law,” was the quiet reply. “You’d better quit playing now, friend,” Gard continued, turning to the Papago. “You’d better quit right off, while you’ve got something left, and go home.”
“You stay where you be, Joe,” growled the man who had asked the question. “Don’t you climb out fer no tenderfoot. I’ll settle the—”
He stopped speaking as the stranger’s eyes blazed full upon him for an instant.
“You go now, Joe,” Gard said, in a low, even voice.
Like a man in a dream old Joe rose, slipping into his pocket the coins he had been about to put into the game when Gard interfered. The tenseness of the situation had brought him to some measure of sobriety, and he did not reel as he left the room. A moment later the patter of his pony’s unshod feet came to the listening ears within.
Gard still held the other men in a gaze that seemed to search and estimate the hidden thought of each.
“Now they’ll kill him, sure,” Sandy Larch thought, slipping nearer, but the stranger took no notice of him.
“Friends,” he said, breaking at last the tense silence that ruled the room, “There’s a law against making an Indian drunk, and there’s a law against robbing him. They’re white men’s laws; and white men ought to keep ’em.”
“It ain’t right”; he went on, still leaning upon the table, and the men listened, as if hypnotized. “There’s things a man can’t do without getting lower down than any man wants to be, and cheating a drunken Indian is one of ’em. That’s the truth of it. You ought not to do it, and when you do somebody’s got to make you stop. That’s why I interfered.... There ain’t any reason though,” he added, as if an after thought, “why you shouldn’t go on with your game, now; I’m going to say good-night.”