“It come Jim Harris’s deal, an’ I noticed the stranger give a sort of a little start as he watched the cards droppin’. Then he looked at his hand an’ I see his face change just the least little. He seemed to hesitate a little an’ then he reached into his pocket an’ pulled out his gun, an’ laid it on the table alongside of his cards. ‘It’s kind of uncomfortable settin’ on the end of it,’ he says with a little grin, which we all understood well enough. Pete Barlow did, anyhow, for he dropped his cards on the table almost before he had lifted them, and flashed out his own gun. ‘That’s so. ’Tis uncomfortable,’ he says, as he lays it on the table. Jim Harris, he warn’t far behind, an’ when he lays out his weapon he says, ‘I might as well be in the fashion.’
“Just naturally we all understood what all that meant, but we warn’t any of us expectin’ what followed. It were fairly amazin’. Ike reached over in front o’ Pete Barlow an’ grabbed his pistol, sayin’ as he did so, ‘You look after your playin’, Pete. If there’s goin’ to be any shootin’ done, I’ll shoot for you.’
“Now I reckon there couldn’t be no worse break made than that, an’ I looked to see Pete break out in a blaze o’ wrath, but I was clean flabbergasted when he looked up pleasant an’ smiled an’ said: ‘All right, Ike.’ I was clean flabbergasted an’ I never understood the thing at all till Ike explained it to me afterward.
“ ‘You see Harris had boxed the cards,’ he says, ‘an’ the stranger seen it. That’s why he pulled his gun. I seen that Pete had three tens an’ a pair o’ aces, an’ I guessed the rest. Now, it was a clean plumb miracle, but I happened to have a ten o’ clubs in my pocket o’ the same pattern o’ cards. It was one of a pack that dropped in the water an’ I’d put it in my pocket. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I can see it was the will o’ heaven. I reached over an’ took the gun just for an excuse to drop the card in Pete’s lap. He seen it an’ tumbled.’
“Well, that’s all there was to it. The stranger, he wouldn’t play the hand, o’ course, but Harris havin’ four sevens, laid for Pete, who just naturally stood pat an’ flashed four tens an’ an ace at the show down. That let Harris out, an’ Pete swatted the stranger till he had to borrow twenty to leave town with. An’ the credit of Arkansas City was saved.”
XIV
IT WAS A GREAT DEAL
“One o’ the commonest failin’s o’ poor fallen humanity is a lack o’ self-control,” said old man Greenhut, as he turned back from the door of his tavern, out of which he had just thrown an unfortunate stranger, and walked around to his place behind the bar rubbing and slapping his hands together, as if to brush off some imaginary taint that might be supposed to have attached to the stranger’s clothes.
The stranger, who didn’t seem to be in good health, and was far from being well dressed, had shuffled in a few moments before and walked up to the stove with a deprecatory air, saying nothing to anybody and warming himself in an apologetic fashion as if he realized that he had no right to the heat and good cheer that radiated from the red-hot sides of that comfortable piece of furniture. Nobody said anything to him, and he coughed once or twice, timidly, before he ventured to walk over to the bar and accost the old man. “Squire,” he said, “I am half-sick, an’ I need a glass o’ liquor powerful bad, but I hain’t got any money. Kin you trust me for a drink? I’ll pay ye for it, honest. I hain’t never beat a man out of a cent in my life, an’ I’ll pay, sure. I wouldn’t ask ye for it, on’y I’m reely sick.”
The old man looked at him steadily while he was talking, but he answered never a word. Slowly he reached under the bar and the stranger’s face brightened up. He thought the old man was reaching for a bottle. After hesitating a little the old man came out from behind the bar. Seizing the unresisting stranger by the collar he rushed him violently to the door, and half-threw and half-kicked him out. Then breaking the silence for the first time since the stranger’s entrance, he delivered himself of the reflections recorded above as he walked slowly back to his place. He stood there for some minutes, evidently thinking of what he had said, and then, business being slack for the moment, he relighted his cigar and came out again to his favourite seat by the window.
“Self-control,” he said, presently, “is God’s best gift to man. The fellow that kin always control himself under all circumstances is the one that’s goin’ to win the pot. Now take that ar shiftless bum that just come in here an’ asked me to supply his necessities at my expense. If he’d ’a’ had any self-control he never would have allowed hisself to be mastered by an accursed longin’ for liquor without the price of it, an’ if I hadn’t ’a’ had my self-control right along with me, like as not I’d ’a’ let him have it. I’ve knowed men to do just such fool things. An’ thar he’d ’a’ been saddled with a debt that he wouldn’t never ’a’ paid, an’ I’d ’a’ been just that much out.