“And he deliberately, before five people, does the clumsiest piece of cheating a man ever did in the world! If he’d wanted to be caught, he couldn’t have done it more openly.”
“By God!”
It was almost a prayer from Penoch. Then he faced me, tense and strained, and his attempted whisper couldn’t have been heard more than a hundred feet.
“He couldn’t have done it deliberately! I know what you think—that because of what I did for him at Laguna he decided to give up Shirley and took that way. But all he had to do was walk out on her, without putting himself in disgrace.”
“Let’s talk to him,” I suggested, and we started immediately to make a new speed record between McMullen and the flying field.
It did seem ridiculous. For what possible reason, short of sheer insanity, would a man brand himself a card-cheat? A man who’d do that would cut off his head to cure an earache. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but I was exuding curiosity in corpulent chunks. I aimed to get at the bottom of things, and quickly.
We found him in his tent, alone, holding communion with a large bottle of tequila.
He stared at us, as we came in, and I’ll swear his eyes brought me up short. There was suffering in them, and a sort of bewilderment. It changed the whole aspect of the man. It was his eyes that repelled one, ordinarily. Now that there was something human in them, the change was magical.
Penoch O’Reilly planted himself, as per usual, his mustache turned upward belligerently, and his eyes snapping.