An hour later the mess tent was still lighted. Within, seated on blocks of timber around a cracker-box, four men were playing poker; and pressing about them was a score of laborers—all, in fact, who could crowd into the tent. The air was foul with cheap tobacco and with the hundred odors that cling to working clothes. The eyes of the twenty or more men were fixed feverishly on the greasy cards, and on the heaps of the day’s pay-slips. By a simple process of elimination the ownership of these slips had been narrowed down to the present players—Jack Flagg, his assistant Charlie, Dimond, and a Mexican. The silence carried a sense of strain. The occasional coarse jokes and boisterous laughter died down with strange suddenness.
“It’s no use,” said Flagg, finally, tossing the cards on the box; “they’re against us.”
The Mexican rose at this, and sullenly left the tent. Dimond, with a conscious laugh, gathered in two-thirds of the slips and pocketed them. It was an achievement to clean out Jack Flagg. The remaining third went to Charlie.
Flagg leaned back, clasped his great knotted hands about one knee, and looked across at Dimond. Six feet and a third tall in his socks, hard as steel rails, he could have lifted any two of the laborers about him clear of the ground, one in each hand. The lower part of his face was half covered with his long, ill-kept mustache and the tuft of hair beneath his under lip. The blue shirt he wore had unmistakably come from a military source, but not a man there, not even Charlie—himself nearly a match for his chief in height and breadth—would have dared ask when he had been in the army, nor why or how he had come to leave it.
“Dimond,” said Flagg, “let me have one of those slips a minute.”
The nervous light left Dimond’s eyes. He threw a suspicious glance across the box; then, after a moment, he complied.
Flagg held the slip near the lantern and examined it.
“Eighty cents,” he muttered, “eighty cents—and for how much work?”
“Half a day,” a laborer replied.