He took the bottle away from his nose, stared at the window's black outline, listened to the clattering frame, and muttered, again sighing: "Sure and them wor-rds don't sound just like the wor-rds that P'laski Britt would say, but in a night like this it isn't always easy to hear aright. I wouldn't steal--but I'll dream I heard him say 'em. 'One drink, Tommy,' I hear him say."
He set the bottle to his lips, tipped it, closed his eyes, and drank until at last, breathless and choking, he felt the bottle suck dry.
"Bless the saints!" he gasped; "it was one drink he said, and sure with my eyes shut I couldn't see how big was the drink." He felt the thrill of the mighty potation from head to toes. His meek spirit became exalted. "If I should go out now," he mumbled, "he would say that I stole it. But I will stay here with the bottle in my hand just as it was when I took the one drink. I will show him. And, after all, it is not much he can do to me--now!" He rubbed a consolatory palm over his glowing stomach. He stood there, beginning at last to rock slowly from heel to toe, until he heard voices and footsteps. The preoccupied barons had not lingered over their repast. "No, I'll not run away. I'll not steal," muttered Tommy Eye, "but--but I'll just crawl under the bunk, here, to think over the snatch of a speech I'll make to him. And a bit later I'll feel more like bein' kicked."
From the safe gloom of his covert he noted that they had brought back with them the boss, Colin MacLeod. Britt turned down the wooden button over the latch of the door and gave his guests cigars.
They smoked in silence for a while, and then Britt spat with a snap of decision into the open fire and spoke.
"MacLeod, a while ago, when we were talkin' about Rodburd Ide's girl, Nina, I told you that I wouldn't interfere in your woman affairs again--or you told me not to interfere--I forgot just which!" There was a little touch of grim irony in his tones--irony that he promptly discarded as he went on. "About that Ide girl--you ought to know that you can't catch her--after what has happened. I know something about women myself. The girl never took to you. If she had cared anything about you she would have run to you and cried over you when you were lying there in the road where Dwight Wade tossed you. That's woman when she's in love with a man. Don't break in on what I'm saying! This isn't any session of cheap men sittin' down to gossip over love questions. It may sound like it, but it's straight business. Don't be a fool any longer. But there's a girl that you have courted and a girl that thinks a lot of you, because I heard her say so one night on Jerusalem Knob. You ought to marry that girl."