The Old Man glanced quickly around the group. Then his face slowly changed.
“That’s so,” he said reflectively, after a pause; “certainly a sort of a skunk and suthin’ of a fool. In course.”
He was silent for a moment, as in painful contemplation of the unsavouriness and folly of the unpopular Smiley.
“Dismal weather, ain’t it?” he added, now fully embarked on the current of prevailing sentiment. “Mighty rough papers on the boys, and no show for money this season. And to-morrow’s Christmas.”
There was a movement among the men at this announcement, but whether of satisfaction or disgust was not plain.
“Yes,” continued the Old Man in the lugubrious tone he had within the last few moments unconsciously adopted—“yes, Christmas, and to-night’s Christmas-eve. Ye see, boys, I kinder thought—that is, I sorter had an idee, jest passin like you know—that may be ye’d all like to come over to my house to-night and have a sort of tear round. But I suppose, now, you wouldn’t? Don’t feel like it, may be?” he added, with anxious sympathy, peering into the faces of his companions.
“Well, I don’t know,” responded Tom Flynn, with some cheerfulness. “P’r’aps we may. But how about your wife, Old Man? What does she say to it?”
The Old Man hesitated.
His conjugal experience had not been a happy one, and the fact was known to Simpson’s Bar.
His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity.