Red Beak Jim clucked at the horses, and they moved off in good style.
The hackman pulled the horses up alongside the step in front of the first roadhouse.
"Hey, don’t get too glad all of a sudden," growled the main guy to Red Beak Jim. "Who told you to do that?"
Red Beak Jim disposed of the lines and stepped down without making any reply, while the four watched him gloomily. Then he grinned, hoisted up the right-hand front flap of his livery coat, dug into his right-hand trousers pocket and pulled out a wad about the size of a healthy cantaloupe.
"I’ll ask youse gents to split a couple o’ quarts on me," said Red Beak Jim. "I got 8 to 1 f’r me forty."
They gazed at him and his wad with their jaws dropping.
"Did you play Kinley Mack?" they gurgled in unison.
"That’s the one youse people said, ain’t it?" inquired Red Beak Jim. "I t’ought I’d take a little flyer on him, jes’ f’r luck."
_And How He Got a Horseman Without Much of a Conscience into Hot Water._
"No Man alive can afford to lose the friendship even of a yaller dog. Not even an ornery yaller dog can you afford to have agin’ you at any stage of the game. The dog’ll get back at you one time or another, sooner or later, and take a mouthful or two out of you, if you haven’t had sense enough to keep him on your staff of friends."
The man who used to make a business of putting ringers over the plates at the outlaw race-tracks had passed from the reflective to the confidential mood. Perhaps the rings which he made on the cherry table with the bottom of his glass suggested circular race-tracks to him. Perhaps the prancing of the fox-terrier pup in the back room made him think of horses kicking up at the post. But, whatever the cause of it, his burst of confidence was unusual, and the other men at the table listened to him attentively.
"My yellow dog was a yellow man—that is, the one I’m thinking about just now," he went on. "He took a hunk out of me down at Alexander Island, Va., near Washington, about five years ago. He had me out. All he had to do was to count ten on me and take the pot, and he knew it. He worked the edge. I didn’t blame him a bit then, and I don’t now. But it was hard money to lose. When I get hold of the right end of a bulge on a man that I’ve got it in for, I don’t hesitate to work it myself—but I always feel a bit sorry for a man that I get up into a corner, all the same. This yellow man felt sorry for me. He showed it. He was about as sympathetic a yellow man as ever I saw on the occasion I’m going to tell you about. But he wouldn’t let go, for all that. He needed the money, of course, but then he wanted to get back at me, too.