“Oh, I’ve fixed that,” replied Dennison, leisurely, “Mother Sal’s a-goin’ to take keer of her till she can do for herself.”
The Rioba dropped his lathe-nail and stopped his pounding. “Mother Sal,” he repeated—“Mother Sal around on San Monito street?”
“Yes! who else?”
Rioba Jack quietly turned and slipped on his coat.
“Dennison,” he said, with an unwonted accent of expostulation lurking in his voice, “don’t do this thing. Keep your hand out of deviltry for once—leastways such deviltry as this. I don’t know Jovanny’s gal. I hain’t hardly ever seen her. ’Taint for myself I’m askin’ it—but just you let her alone. Won’t you?”
Dennison had removed his pipe from his mouth for good now. He stood staring angrily at the Rioba, whose clear, dark eyes under their bushy brows were fixed with unwonted brilliancy upon his own. The proprietor of the Cosmopolitan burst into a rude laugh. “What’s the matter with the man?” he ejaculated. Then returning the Rioba’s steadfast gaze with an equally pertinacious and meaning one, he answered with much deliberateness, “Look-a-here, Rioba, I suppose I can take a hint if I must—especially when it’s rammed down into my skull as this one appears to be. You and me has got along without trouble for ever since we come to Yellow Bear. I should be sorry, very sorry, to be obleeged to have any unpleasantness between us now. I always feel bound to have unpleasantness with any man, partner or stranger, who interferes with my own partic’ler concerns. Do you take?”
The Rioba made no direct reply. He stood with his eyes bent upon the floor abstractedly. Nevertheless he “took.” “Good-night, Dennison—good-night, ‘Mister,’” he suddenly said, and turning abruptly upon his heel he quitted the Cosmopolitan without another syllable.
The gray Nevada dawn was beginning to filter between the sharp Sierra peaks. Yellow Bear looked like a sketch in India-ink on gray paper. Around the corner of the Cosmopolitan came a little procession not irreverently conveying upon a shutter something over which a sheet had been loosely spread. The air was raw and cold. “Careful—that’s it—steady now,” cautioned Dennison in a low voice as they mounted the Cosmopolitan doorstep. “Mister,” Rioba Jack, Big Jinny, and Pearl Kate set down their burden at the upper end of the dance-room. “Come gals, fly round,” exhorted Dennison, “there’s all the bar to be set up across there—them windows has got to be darkened up—there ain’t no time to waste. ‘Mister’ and me’ll tend to our share of the performance.” “I say, Jinny,” questioned the Rioba sotto voce to that Paphian nymph a moment later, when Dennison and “Mister” were engaged at a distance, “you left her asleep, eh?” (There had, by the way, been no allusion from either party concerned as to the embryo “unpleasantness” of the preceding night—again to “Mister’s” secret regret). “Sound, Jack—just like she was dead drunk,” responded Big Jinny, cheerfully, pounding away with her hammer at the window-sash. Her interrogator frowned. The answer somehow gritted against his dormant sense of the fitting. Big Jinny drove another tack and began to whistle.
A little later a magnificent eastern flare of pink and gold fell through the one window yet undarkened upon the face of Professor Jovanny, peacefully upturned from his last pillow—a roll of his own thumbed dance-music wrapped about with a white bar napkin. A moth-eaten knitted lap-robe was thrown across his feet. Dressed in his one threadbare black suit—a pile of his own music beneath the forlorn gray head—truly here went one to the grave with all that he possessed—except a daughter.
Dennison, the Rioba, “Mister” and the women stood for a moment motionless beside the body—their tasks completed.