“If I know a thing, that’s just what it isn’t,” he said, sending the ash of his cigar sprawling. “The forty-first blew in to-day with the record of a sewer.”
“But we don’t take in folks with that sort of record,” Jim protested. “Who sent him?”
“Your man in Vancouver.”
“Richards?”
“Sure.”
“What’s his trouble?”
“Smuggling Chinks. And with that goes the dope trade, if I know a thing, though he don’t admit it. Then he beat the boy who arrested him over the head with a lead pipe, and made his getaway. He didn’t kill the feller, but—it wasn’t his fault. Richards reckoned because he hadn’t killed him he could send him along. It looks like Richards stretched a point in this boy’s case. And when that sort of thing happens it seems to me there’s an ugly look in it. Do you get me? This boy’s a real tough. You’ll see him in awhile.”
Pryse remained silent, and Larry went on. He pointed out across the valley where the twinkling lights were shining.
“I took a walk around those bunk-houses just after the dinner hour, and happened on some knife-play. You know that boy, Dago Naudin? Reckons he’s French, ’an stinks of sage brush. He’d chewed off Slattery’s right ear, and was yearning to disembowel him with a ten-inch knife that I’ll swear has tasted the job before. Here’s the knife.”
He drew a vicious-looking weapon out of a sheath slung at the back of his belt, and touched the edge of it with his thumb. It was horn handled, and studded with inlays of what looked like gold and silver.