“Good heavens!” the listener ejaculated. “Cave-man is right!”
“One of the laws of the jungle that Kipling didn’t mention,” was the first assistant’s terse summing-up. “Dargin saw something that he wanted, and that was his way of reaching out and taking it. But now comes the queer part of it. The young plunger disappeared between two days, and everybody looked to see the woman take up with Dargin. But that isn’t what happened. She stayed on at the Hophra House for a few days and then sent for her father, a poor devil of a machinist who seemed to be trying to drink himself to death. Either she or Dargin got him a job at the Murtrie mine, and the two of them set up housekeeping in one of the mine shacks.”
“Dargin and the woman, you mean?”
“No! the woman and her father. And that’s the way it has been ever since. Making all due allowances for the time and place, Dargin’s relations with the woman are the only half-way decent ones he has. The old man was drunk half the time, so Dargin gave the girl a job playing the piano in his dance-hall—by way of giving her a chance to earn an honest living, you’d say. That seems to be as far as it has gone, except that one day last fall a tipsy ‘hard-rock’ man tried to take liberties with the girl at the piano, and when she fought him, struck her. He skipped out, across the range, but Black Jack caught up with him and shot him.”
David Vallory’s premonition of coming tragedy had been fulfilled long before Plegg reached this point in his story, but if there had been any doubt as to the woman’s identity the incident of the “hard-rock” man would have dispelled it. Oddly enough, the filling-out of Judith Fallon’s story did not seem to lessen his own feeling of moral obligation; on the contrary, it increased it. More than ever, as it appeared, it was needful that Judith should be taken quickly out of the false position into which her relations, innocent or otherwise, with the man-killer had placed her.
By this time their progress up the single street of the town had brought them to another of the resorts; a dance-hall, this, also with its bar-room annex. There was little room on the dancing-floor for spectators, and they did not try to enter. But enough could be seen from the bar to determine the character of the place.
“This is Dargin’s other place,” said Plegg. “It’s the least tough of any of the Powder Can joints, and the money is made over the bar. If a man gets too well ‘lit up’ he is thrown out. Most of the women you see in there are the miners’ wives and daughters. It hurts us chiefly because it attracts men who would neither gamble nor drink if they didn’t start in here on a sort of social plane.”
David nodded and was turning away when a hand was laid on his arm and he wheeled quickly.
“Judith!” he gasped. Then, as Plegg stood aside and pretended not to see or hear; “My God!”
“Yes,” she said, “’tis ‘Judith’ now, and never ‘Glory’ any more. What brings you here, Davie?”