With the proffered pencil stub, he fell to work making regular dots on the cube of sugar. Mack, after one questioning glance, saw his intent and grinned.
“Roll dice for him, hey?” he chuckled. “Good boy! Only we’ll have to rub those spots off the sugar afterward. Moyle sets a heap of store by that trophy. He’ll be as sore as a—”
“Roll, first?” asked Joel, finishing the transformation of a smudged lump of sugar into a spotty-looking and irregular die.
“No, you,” said Mack. “Best two out of three. Let ’er roll!”
Treve had come back from a fruitless quartering of the room, for Brean. He stood inquisitively beside the table, as Joel prepared to cast the die. Treve knew well what the spotted object was. In early puppyhood his breeder’s little daughter used to give him lumps of sugar to eat; until her father had caught her at it and had forbidden her to do it any more; telling her that sugar is bad for a dog’s teeth and stomach. The pup had regretted deeply the loss of these delicious treats.
“Say!” snarled Joel, as he paused in the act of rolling the die. “I remember, now. I always remember, sometime or other.”
“Remember what?” asked Royce, impatiently. “Remember you promised your dying great-aunt you’d never shake dice with any man named Mack? Oh, roll it out, man! I want that dog. He sure is—”
“I remember that slick English crook,” went on Joel, unheeding. “He’s the tramp that panhandled us for grub, back at the house, last year; and tried to steal the tobacco jar. I told him, then, I’d put a bullet in him if he ever dast show his face here aga’n.”
Pettishly, cross at memory of the swindle, he rolled the cube of sugar across the table. In his ill-temper, he rolled it an inch too far. It bounced off the table-edge.
But it was not destined to land on the floor. In mid-air Treve caught it. In another second he was crunching it, rapturously.