The two waiters were big fellows, notwithstanding their ability to move noiselessly about the room. They hurled themselves between the combatants.
Their interference was only just in time to prevent a straight left from landing on the chin of the player who had been charged with cheating, and at that, one of them got the fist himself in the back of his neck.
“Don’t, Mr. Milmarsh!” begged the other waiter, as he wound his arms around the waist of the infuriated owner of the fist. “Don’t make a noise! They’ll hear it downstairs. It’s a mistake! It must be!”
But Howard Milmarsh cared only for vengeance just then.
“Get away, will you?” was all he replied. “If you don’t, I’ll break your skull with a bottle. I’m going to make that scoundrel over there confess, and then I’ll thrash him till he won’t know that he ever had a face. It never will be the same face again,” he added grimly.
But the waiter hung on to the young fellow, while his comrade tried to push the other man back toward the door of an anteroom where hung the coats and hats of the players, and which was also fitted up as a lavatory.
“Come back here, you white-livered cur!” shouted Milmarsh. “You, I mean—Richard Jarvis! The fellow who calls himself a cousin of mine! Come back and let us look at what you have inside your cuff!”
The man he had called Richard Jarvis, who had been slinking behind the others, as if he had changed his mind about fighting, and desired only to get away, made a quick move toward the door leading to the other part of the house.
“Stop him!” shouted Milmarsh. “If once he gets out of that door he’ll destroy the evidence.”