“It’s worth more,” declared Chicken Bill, “but me an’ you, Maggie, ain’t got the long green to develop it. Our best play is to cash in if we can get the figure.”
But disaster was striding on the trail of Chicken Bill. That evening, as Deadwood Maggie was returning to the Belle Union from the Dutch Woman’s Store, to which mart she had been driven for a tooth-brush, she was blasted with the spectacle of Chicken Bill and a Mexican girl in confidential converse just ahead. Deadwood Maggie, a bit violent of nature, had been in no wise calmed by her several years on the border. While not wildly in love, still her impulse was to dismantle, if not dismember, the senorita thus softly whispering and being whispered to by the recreant Chicken Bill. But on second thought Deadwood Maggie restrained herself. She would observe the full untruth of Chicken Bill.
The next day, when Chicken Bill called on Dead-wood Maggie, he was met with a smothering flight of table furniture and told never to come back.
It was a crisis with Chicken Bill. The assay had been a victory and the stranger stood ready, cash in hand, to pay the sixty thousand dollars demanded for The Flim Flam Murphy. Chicken Bill felt the necessity of getting the money without delay. Any marplot, whether from drink or that mean officiousness which hypocrites call “conscience,” might say the word that would arm the tenderfoot with a knowledge of his peril. But Chicken Bill could not come to speech with Dead-wood Maggie. In a blaze of jealousy, that wronged woman would begin throwing things the moment he appeared. As a last resort, Chicken Bill dispatched the bar-keeper of the Four Flush to Dead-wood Maggie. This diplomat was told to set forth the crying needs of the hour, Chicken Bill promising friendship for life and five hundred dollars if he made Deadwood Maggie see reason.
Ten minutes later the bar-keeper returned, bleeding from a cut over his eye.
“Did it with a stove-lifter,” he explained, as he laved the wound in a basin at the corner of the bar. “Say! you can’t get near enough to that lady to give her a diamond ring.”
Chicken Bill made a gesture of despair; he saw that Deadwood Maggie was lost to him forever.