We left our horses, busy at their suppers, beside the brawling river, and walked back to camp. It was a Caravaggio scene by the firelight. Jim Robinson had produced cards. The men of the mail party were intent over the game. Even Jake Shamberlain had easily forgotten his distrust of the strangers. The two suspects, whether with an eye to future games, or because they could not offend their comrades and protectors for this dangerous journey, were evidently playing fair. Robinson would sometimes exhibit a winning hand, and say, with an air of large liberality, “Ye see, boys, I ked rake down yer dimes, ef I chose; but this here is a game among friends. I’m playin’ for pastime. I’ve made my pile olreddy, and so’s my pardener.”
The gambler’s face and the gambler’s manner are the same all over the world. Always the same impassible watchfulness. Always the same bullying cruelty or feline cruelty. Always the same lurking triumph, and the same lurking sneer at the victim. The same quiet satisfaction that gamesters will be geese, and gamblers are deputed to pluck them; the same suppressed chuckle over the efforts of the luckless to retrieve bad luck; the same calm confidence that the lucky player will by and by back the wrong card, the wrong color, or the wrong number, and the bank will take back its losses. What hard faces they wear! Wear,—for their faces seem masks merely, dropped only at stealthy moments. Always the same look and the same manner. Young and beautiful faces curdle into it. Women’s even. I have seen women, the slaves of the hells their devils kept, whose faces would have been fair and young, if this ugly mask could but be torn away. All men and all women who make prey of their fellows, who lie in wait to seize and dismember brothers and sisters, get this same relentless expression. It fixes itself deepest on a gambler; he must hold the same countenance from the first lamp-lighting until indignant dawn pales the sickly light of lamps, and the first morning air creeps in to stir the heavy-hearted atmosphere, and show that it is poison.
“I’ve seen villains just like those two,” said Brent, “in every hell in Europe and America. They always go in pairs; a tiger and a snake; a bully and a wheedler.
“Mind and matter. The old partnership, like yours and mine.”
Next morning the two strangers were free and accepted members of the party. They travelled on with us without question. Smith the gaunt affected a rough frankness of manner. Robinson was low comedy. His head was packed with scurvy jokes and stories. He had a foul leer on his face whenever he was thinking his own thoughts. But either, if suddenly startled, showed the unmistakable look that announces worse crime than mere knavery.
They tangled their names so that we perceived each was an alias hastily assumed. Smith compared six-shooters with me. I detected on his the name Murker, half erased. Once, too, Brent heard Murker, alias Smith, call his partner Larrap.
“Larrap is appropriate,” said I, when Brent told me this; “just the name for him, as that unlucky mule branded ‘A. & A.’ could testify.”
“The long ruffian studied my face, when he made that slip, to see if I had heard. He might as well have inspected the air for the mark of his traitorous syllables.”
“You claim that your phiz is so covered with hieroglyphs, inscriptions of fine feeling, that there is no room to write suspicions of other men’s villany?”
“A clean heart keeps a clean face. A guilty heart will announce itself at eyes and lips and cheeks, and by a thousand tremors of the nerves. I have no prejudices against the family Larrap. But when Larrap’s mate spoke the name, he looked at me as if he had been committing a murder, and had by an irresistible impulse proclaimed the fact. Look at him now! how he starts and half turns whenever one of our horses makes a clatter. He dares not quite look back. He knows there is something after him.”