“Sure!” grinned the latter. “Great dope. If Cy hadn’t coaxed me into a game of draw, I’d been there myself, instead of missing all the fun.”
“You’d ought to thank me,” said Russell philosophically. “If you hadn’t been so busy losing your dough to Pete and me, you’d likely got your block knocked off down the street. According to accounts, there wasn’t nothing playful about that mix-up.”
“I reckon not,” sighed Pollock regretfully. “They say the lad that started the rumpus, whoever he was, got into a corner and held off the whole bunch for ten minutes. He must be some scrapper. I got mixed up in a strike riot in Chicago once, and, believe me, it’s no cinch to stand off a crowd of roughnecks like that.”
“Humph!” grunted the manager. He had cooled down considerably while the others were speaking, and was doing some thinking. “Any of the boys see it?”
“Sure! Buck got a look-in, he was telling us.”
Brennan glanced swiftly down to where Fargo sat at the end of the table. “How about last night, Buck?” he called, in a deceptively mild tone. “Were you the one who started the rough-house downtown?”
“Nix on that!” grinned the catcher. “It was going full blast when I got there. I seen all I wanted to from the outskirts. The crowd was plumb crazy. About a hundred of ’em trying to get at one poor bloke penned in behind the upset ticket booth. Them that couldn’t get a whack at him hit somebody else for luck, and a dozen nice little individual scraps were going on all over the place.”
“But who was the man?” Brennan persisted. “Didn’t you see him?”
“Couldn’t get a sight of him from the street,” Fargo answered readily. “The ticket booth was too high. I run into one of your cubs—Locke’s his name—trying to get out of the crowd, and we came home together.”
The manager frowned suspiciously. He knew Fargo of old, and realized that he was just the sort of man to be concerned in an affair of this description. The catcher’s gaze was candid and open, however, and the closest scrutiny failed to disclose as much as a scratch on his face.