“No?” Dr. Carey questioned.
“No. I’ve got hold enough of Smith now to make him afraid of me if I’d turn loose. I’d a made money by doin’ it, too. Good clean money. That’s why he’s gettin’ good and drunk to beat me up again tonight, maybe.”
“Well, why don’t you tighten up on him? Why let a scoundrel like that run free?” Carey inquired.
“Because it might drag Leigh Shirley’s name into the muss. And I’m no devourer of widders and orphans; I’m a humane man, and I’ll let Smith run till his tether snaps and he falls over the precipice and breaks his neck for hisself. Besides I’m not sure now whether he’s a agent, representin’ some principal, or the principal representin’ 273 hisself. And in that case I’d have to deal the cards different for him, and them he’d do harm to.”
“You are a humane man, Champers,” Carey declared. “I think I’ve hated you, too, a good many years. These gray hairs of ours ought to make us better behaved now. But, even if you do let Smith run, that ’blind tiger’ of Wyker’s must go out of business. I’ll start John Jacobs after that hole one of these days. He holds the balance of power on public sentiment out here. He’ll clear it out. His hatred of saloons is like Smith’s hatred of Shirley, only it’s a righteous indignation. I’ve heard John’s father was a drunkard and his mother followed her husband into a saloon in Cincinnati to persuade him out and was killed by a drunken tough. Anyhow, John will break up that game of Wyker’s one of these times. See if he doesn’t.”
Darley Champers slowly shifted his huge frame into an easier posture as he replied:
“Yes, he can do it all right. But mark me, now, the day he runs Hans Wyker out of that doggery business it will be good-by to John Jacobs. You see if it isn’t. I wouldn’t start him after it too quick.”
Darley Champers spent two weeks with his physician, and the many friends of Dr. Carey smiled and agreed with Todd Stewart, who declared:
“Carey would win Satan to be his fast friend if the Old Scratch would only let Carey doctor him once.”
But nobody understood how the awakening of the latent manhood in Darley Champers and his determination to protect an orphan girl were winning the doctor to him as well.