"No."
"And you say she's bilked us?"
"Yes."
"You're a darn'd infernal liar!" The gambler rose as he said this, snatched up his silver box and dashed it into the teeth of Hatchet-face. And he, coward as he was, put up his hands and held them to his mouth while the blood ran down between his fingers.
"I don't keer, Judge, I don't keer, if I broke every tooth in his head. I don't 'low no white-livered son of a gun to go about a-talking about a woman like that."
Then the gambler, walking off, said to those around him in a lower tone, "It don't take no twelve months nohow. Now there's the yaller cat; 'bout four litters in a year. Twelve months be blowed! That's an old woman's story. Then that's in Missoury, anyhow, and what's the climate of Missoury got to do with Californy, I'd like to know? No, gentlemen; some apples gits ripe soon, and some don't git ripe till frost comes. Them's things, gentlemen, as we don't know nothing about. Them's mysteries, and none of our business, nohow. Show me the man," and here he began to roar like a Numidian lion, and to tower up above the crowd, while a face like a razor shot out through the door, looking back frightened as it fled, "Show me the man as says it's not all right, and I'll shake him out of his boots."
The gambler picked up his battered box, but he was evidently not in a good humor. He wiped it on his coat-sleeve, and polished it up and down, but was ill content. At last, looking out from under his great slouch hat, he saw the top in the center of a little knot of men holding up his hand and counting his fingers. He threw the box down on the table and rushed into the knot of men.
"A bully set you are, ain't you? Gw'yne around a-counting up after a sick woman. And what do you know, anyhow?" He took hold of the nervous top, and again set it spinning. "That little woman, she come as we come. God Almighty didn't set no mark and gauge on you, and you shan't go 'round and count up after her. Do you hear? Now you git. You're wanted. Hatchet-face wants yer. Do you hear?"
The man spun his top about till its face was to the door, and it went out as a sort of handle to the hatchet, and was seen no more that night.
Yet for all this there had been a great ripple in the wave that had to run even to the shore before it could disappear from the face of things at the Forks.