"High, Low, Jack, and game! Fork! Fork!" Once more there arose a high falsetto shriek of jubilant laughter.
Walter Wyatt crept noiselessly down the steep slant toward the shutter. He had no sense of intrusion, for he was often one of the merry blades wont to congregate at the forge at night and take a hand at cards, despite the adverse sentiment of the cove and the vigilance of the constable of the district, bent on enforcing the laws prohibiting gaming. As Wyatt stood at the crevice of the shutter the whole interior was distinct before him—the disabled wagon-wheels against the walls, the horse-shoes on a rod across the window, the great hood of the forge, the silent bellows, with its long, motionless handle. A kerosene lamp, perched on the elevated hearth of the forge, illumined the group of wild young mountaineers clustered about a barrel on the head of which the cards were dealt. There were no chairs; one of the gamesters sat on a keg of nails; another on an inverted splint basket; two on a rude bench that was wont to be placed outside the door for the accommodation of customers waiting for a horse to be shod or a plow to be laid. An onlooker, not yet so proficient as to attain his ambition of admission to the play, had mounted the anvil, and from this coign of vantage beheld all the outspread landscape of the "hands." More than once his indiscreet, inadvertent betrayal of some incident of his survey of the cards menaced him with a broken head. More innocuous to the interests of the play was a wight humbly ensconced on the shoeing-stool, which barely brought his head to the level of the board; but as he was densely ignorant of the game, he took no disadvantage from his lowly posture. His head was red, and as it moved erratically about in the gloom, Watt Wyatt thought for a moment that it was the smith's red setter. He grinned as he resolved that some day he would tell the fellow this as a pleasing gibe; but the thought was arrested by the sound of his own name.
"Waal, sir," said the dealer, pausing in shuffling the cards, "I s'pose ye hev all hearn 'bout Walter Wyatt's takin' off."
"An' none too soon, sartain." A sour visage was glimpsed beneath the wide brim of the speaker's hat.
"Waal," drawled the semblance of the setter from deep in the clare-obscure, "Watt war jes a fool from lack o' sense."
"That kind o' fool can't be cured," said another of the players. Then he sharply adjured the dealer. "Look out what ye be doin'! Ye hev gimme two kyerds."
"'Gene Barker will git ter marry Minta Elladine Riggs now, I reckon," suggested the man on the anvil.
"An' I'll dance at the weddin' with right good will an' a nimble toe," declared the dealer, vivaciously. "I'll be glad ter see that couple settled. That gal couldn't make up her mind ter let Walter Wyatt go, an' yit no woman in her senses would hev been willin' ter marry him. He war ez onresponsible ez—ez—fox-fire."
"An' ez onstiddy ez a harricane," commented another.
"An' no more account than a mole in the yearth," said a third.