"Is Gahey not going to fight?" I asked Moleskin in a whisper.
"My God! don't you see that he's playin' banker?" said Joe, and I had to be content with that answer, which was also an explanation of the man's lack of remembrance. Fighting must be awfully common and boring to the man when he forgets one so easily, I thought. To me a fight was something which I looked forward to for days, and which I thought of for weeks afterwards. Now I felt a trifle afraid of Gahey. I was of little account in his eyes, and I concluded, for I jump quickly to conclusions, that I would not make much of a show if I stood up against such a man, a man who looked upon a fight as something hardly worthy of notice. I decided to let the matter drop and trouble about it no further. I think that if Gahey had asked me to fight at that moment I should have refused. The truth was that I became frightened of the man.
"Can I have a hand while I'm cookin' my grub?" Joe asked the dealer, a man of many oaths whose name was Maloney, a personage already enshrined in the song written by Mullholland on the Shootin' of the Crow.
"The more the merrier!" was the answer, given in a tone of hearty assent. On hearing these words Moleskin left the pan under my care, put down a coin on the table, and with one eye on the steak, and another on the game, he waited for the turn-up of the banker's card. During the whole meal my mate devoted the intervals between bites to the placing of money on the card table. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, and when the game concluded with a free fight my mate had lost every penny of his sub., and thirteen pence which he had borrowed from me. It was hard to determine how the quarrel started, but at the commencement nearly every one of the players was involved in the fight, which gradually resolved itself into an affair between two of the gamblers, Blasting Mick and Ben the Moocher.
Red Billy Davis came in at that moment, and between two planks, wallowing in the filth, he found the combatants tearing at one another for all they were worth.
"Go out and fight, and be damned to yous!" roared Red Billy, catching the two men as they scrambled to their feet. "You want to break ev'rything in the place, you do! Curses be on you! go out into the world and fight!" he cried, taking them by their necks and shoving them through the door.
Nothing daunted, however, both continued the quarrel outside in the darkness. No one evinced any desire to go out and see the result of the fight, but I was on the tip-toe of suspense waiting for the finish of the encounter. I could hear the combatants panting and slipping outside, but thinking that the inmates of the shack would consider me a greenhorn if I went to look at the fight I remained inside. I resolved to follow Moleskin's guidance for at least a little while longer; I lacked the confidence to work on my own initiative.
"Clean broke!" said Moleskin, alluding to his own predicament, as he sat down by the fire, and asked the man next to him for a chew of tobacco. "Money is made round to go round, anyway," he went on; "and there is some as say that it is made flat to build upon, but that's damned rot. Doesn't ev'ryone here agree with that?"
"Ev'ryone," was the hearty response.
"Why the devil do all of you agree?" Joe looked savagely exasperated. "Has no man here an opinion of his own? You, Tom Slavin, used to save your pay when you did graft at Toward Waterworks, and what did you do with your money?"