[CHAPTER XIII—A FAIR ADVOCATE]
Thanks to the fashion in which the hotel-keeper managed the affair, the gambler left the settlement without personal injury, but very little richer than when he entered it. The rest of those who were present at his meeting with Witham were also not desirous that their friends should know they had been victimized, and because Dane was discreet, news of what had happened might never have reached Silverdale, had not one of the younger men ridden in to the railroad a few days later. Odd scraps of conversation overheard led him to suspect that something unusual had taken place, but as nobody seemed willing to supply details, he returned to Silverdale with his curiosity unsatisfied. As it happened, he was shortly afterwards present at a gathering of his neighbours at Macdonald’s farm and came across Ferris there.
“I heard fragments of a curious story at the settlement,” he said. “There was trouble of some kind in which a professional gambler figured last Saturday night, and though nobody seemed to want to talk about it, I surmised that somebody from Silverdale was concerned in it.”
He had perhaps spoken a trifle more loudly than he had intended, and there were a good many of the Silverdale farmers with a few of their wives and daughters whose attention was not wholly confined to the efforts of Mrs. Macdonald at the piano in the long room just then. In any case a voice broke through the silence that followed the final chords.
“Ferris could tell us if he liked. He was there that night.”
Ferris, who had cause for doing so, looked uncomfortable, and endeavoured to sign to the first speaker that it was not desirable to pursue the topic.
“I have been in tolerably often of late. Had things to attend to,” he said.
The other man was, however, possessed by a mischievous spirit, or did not understand him. “You may just as well tell us now as later, because you never kept a secret in your life,” he said.
In the meantime, several of the others had gathered about them, and Mrs. Macdonald, who had joined the group, smiled as she said, “There is evidently something interesting going on. Mayn’t I know, Gordon?”
“Of course,” said the man, who had visited the settlement. “You shall know as much as I do, though that is little, and if it excites your curiosity you can ask Ferris for the rest. He is only anxious to enhance the value of his story by being mysterious. Well, there was a more or less dramatic happening, of the kind our friends in the old country unwarrantably fancy is typical of the West, in the saloon at the settlement not long ago. Cards, pistols, a professional gambler, and the unmasking of foul play, don’t you know. Somebody from Silverdale played the leading rôle.”