“You’ve insulted my lady friend. I’ll have your life for that!” He plunged out of his chair and drove against the wall in his unsteadiness.
The girl was profanely advising me—no, entreating me—to kill the “drunken fool.” I didn’t blame her for her fire, and I could excuse her language. To shift from a tickling under the chin to a mally-hackling of toes was a little too strong for a woman’s nature even if the toes had been cracked with money.
That was no time for fine figuring as to ways, means, or chances. Before Captain Holstrom recovered his balance I grabbed his sacks and stuffed them into my pockets. I started for the door. I had a sort of muddled memory of a maxim, or proverb, or something of the kind which says that “where a man’s treasure is there will his heart be also.” It occurred to me that Captain Holstrom’s body would go with his heart if I made off with that money, and I preferred to have the body chase me on two legs rather than be lugged on my shoulders. If he would chase me back to the ferry the situation would be simplified. Of course, mine was a crazy expedient, considering the place where I was, but it was a crazy evening, anyway.
“I’m not stealing it,” I yelled at him as I opened the door. “I’m going to give it to your girl, and if you run hard enough you’ll see me give it to her.”
I had plenty of help in opening that door. There were men outside who helped me so promptly and unanimously that it was evident they had been lying in wait.
Two of them grabbed me by the neck as they would have clutched a bat stick in choosing sides in a game of three old cat. They rammed me back into the room. There were three other men who came in, and one of them was that rat of a Beason.
They were all talking at one another, and Beason was spitting words the fastest. But Captain Holstrom drowned out all other sounds by a bellow of delight. He knew these men, all right. He seemed especially tickled to behold the two men who held me. He slapped them on their backs, cuffed their faces with drunken affection, and adjured them to hold me tighter.
“He took my money! He stole it! He insulted a lady friend of mine. He’s been chasing me and picking a row with me for three days,” he lied, or else the rum he had been drinking had elongated his notions of time.
“You see, I get your twenty, Mr. Keedy,” insisted Beason. “I told you straight. I called the turn on this fly guy. He’s what I told you he was. You just heard what the captain said.”
I was mighty busy just then with the two men who were holding me, and Captain Holstrom was giving me some slaps which were drunkenly heavy, but not affectionate. However, I heard what Beason said, and I saw the man whom he called Keedy pass over a twenty-dollar gold piece. Beason grinned at me and scuttled out of the room. The Keedy person pushed the scolding girl out after him and slammed the door.