So Steve unlocked the door, and Dan emerged ruefully.
“That Darby—him,” he said. “It’s the wise man I’d ’ve bin to have lave him be. Kape them quiet as ye can, Steve. I’ll not come near unless it gets too bad and there’s risk o’ life.”
But there was little quiet in the township that night. The men from the cells had partly sobered, and hastened to make up for the lost drinks, and the others kept pace with them. They took off their boots and ran foot-races, and thereafter at intervals through the night had to keep changing boots, each to find his own; they pulled a buggy from the hotel yard and piled themselves into it, and had shoot-the-chute rides down the hill to the bridge, till the buggy cannoned the post and dissolved in splintered wreckage; they went then for the stage coach, but instead brought out the coach horses and captured a pair of stray bullocks, and held handicap races down the main street; and then by the light of blazing bonfires of straw from the hotel stable held a buck-jumping competition with the coach horses and bullocks. The horses put up a creditable performance after wisps of smoking straw were flourished under their noses, but they were easily outclassed by the bullocks after knots had been tied in their tails.
It was getting towards dawn when fun turned swiftly to tragedy. The men were congregated in the bar again, and were getting past the stage of noise and exertion, when a chance remark from one of the townsmen started the thing. He was a fat tub of a man with a bloated red face, and he had been drunk early in the evening, had slept himself sober, and was now hastening to get drunk again.
“What’s this I’m hearin’ about a woman up at the Ridge?” he said. “Startin’ a harem, are ye? Do you ...” and he made a particularly unmistakable and coarse question.
Steve Knight was the only Thunder Ridge man who caught the remark—but he was enough. He was on the man in a flash and struck him heavily across the mouth, “You filthy foul-mouthed brute,” he grated between set teeth. The man staggered back and recovered himself with an effort. The other men crowded round, and the remark was repeated angrily from one to the other. Some of the Ridge men pressed forward threateningly, but Steve turned on them with a savage snarl. “Leave be,” he said, his livid face working and his eyes blazing. “This is my job....” He turned back to the man. “You ...” and he called him a name which in the outside country a man must resent with blows or for ever lose the respect of his fellows.
“I hadn’t heard—” stammered the man, “I didn’t know, Steve, that she was your woman....”
Steve Knight had him by the throat before he could say more, and was shaking and choking the breath out of him till his red face grew purple and his tongue protruded. The other men threw themselves on the pair and tore them apart, Steve fighting to get free and the other cowering back shrinking and coughing.
“Serve ’im right,” “Tar an’ feather ’im,” “Chuck ’im in the river,” stormed the Ridge men, but some of the townsmen held them back and pushed the man outside. “Get off, Durgan,” said one of them. “Get away home quick. We’ll try an’ hold ’em back, but they look ugly. Keep outer sight,” and he slipped back to the others while Durgan went reeling and lurching down the street.
After a little the men went back to drinking, but half an hour after a white-faced townsman burst in on them.