“Which wouldn’t happen wi’ folk o’ your kidney around.”
Shaky was on his feet in an instant, and his anger was blazing in his fierce eyes.
“Say, you gorl——”
“Set right ther’, Shaky,” broke in Slum, as the big man sprang toward him. “Set right ther’; ther’ ain’t goin’ to be no hoss-play.”
Slum Ranks had not shifted his position, but his right hand had dived into his jacket pocket and his eyes flashed ominously. And the carpenter dropped back into his seat without a word.
And Tresler looked on in amazement. It was all so quick, so sudden. There had hardly been a breathing space between the passing of their good-nature and their swift-rising anger. The strangeness of it all, the lawlessness, fascinated him. He knew he was on the fringe of civilization, but he had had no idea of how sparse and short that fringe was. He thought that civilization depended on the presence of white folk. That, of necessity, white folk must themselves have the instincts of civilization.
Here he saw men, apparently good comrades all, who were ready, on the smallest provocation, to turn and rend each other. It was certainly a new life to him, something that perhaps he had vaguely dreamt of, but the possibility of the existence of which he had never seriously considered.
But, curiously enough, as he beheld these things for himself for the first time, they produced no shock, they disturbed him in nowise. It all seemed so natural. More, it roused in him a feeling that such things should be. Possibly this feeling was due to his own upbringing, which had been that of an essentially athletic university. He even felt the warm blood surge through his veins at the prospect of a forcible termination to the two men’s swift passage of arms.
But the ebullition died out as quickly as it had risen. Slum slid from the bar to the ground, and his deep-set eyes were smiling again.