“Go in and speak to him now. The game may run on till midnight. You know Dad! If, by any chance, Sandy puts up a good fight and prolongs the game, he’ll have it to do all over again and again until Dad beats him hard, and if Sandy plays a poor game, then he’ll be as sore no one’ll be able to go near him and he’ll make me take his place. So there you are. You may as well take the bull by the horns right now, and hop to it.”
The woman tempted and the man did fall.
The foreman of O Bar O, endeavouring to put firmness and resolution into his softened step, took his courage into his hands and entered the forbidden presence of the chess players. Hat in hand, nervously twisting it about, tobacco shifted respectfully into one cheek, this big, lanky gawk of a man cleared his throat apologetically. Only a slight twitch of one bushy eyebrow betrayed the fact of P. D.’s irritated knowledge of the presence of intruders.
“Dad!” Hilda’s voice trembled slightly. She appreciated the gravity of interrupting her father’s game, but Hilda was in that exalted mood of the hero who sacrifices his own upon the altar of necessity and duty. What had occurred at the corrals was a climax to her own judgment and condemnation of the prisoner before the bar.
P. D. affected not to hear that “Dad!” On the contrary, he elaborately raised his hand, paused it over a knight, lifted the knight and set it from a black to a red square. Dangerous and violent consequences, Hilda knew, were more than likely to follow should she persist. A matter of life and death concerned not the chess monomaniac when a game was in progress. Not till the old gambler could shout the final:
“Check to your king, sir! Game!” should man, woman, child, or dog dare to address the players.
“Dad!”
P. D.’s hand, which had just left the aforementioned Knight, made a curious motion. It closed up into a fist that shot into the palm of his left hand. Up flashed bright old eyes, glaring fiercely through double-lensed glasses. Up lifted the shaggy old head, jerked amazedly from one to the other of the discomfited pair before him.
“What’s this? What’s this? Business hours changed, heh? Who the——”
Bully Bill cleared his throat elaborately and lustered a clumsy step forward.