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"What was that you called me, Baldy?" he asked. "What kind of a concert was it?" "A 'consort," corrected Baldy "a 'prince-consort. It's a kind of short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a four-card flush." Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard from the floor. "I'm ridin' back to the ranch to-day," he said half-heartedly.
"What was that you called me, Baldy?" he asked. "What kind of a concert was it?" "A 'consort," corrected Baldy "a 'prince-consort. It's a kind of short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a four-card flush." Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard from the floor. "I'm ridin' back to the ranch to-day," he said half-heartedly.
If I give ye that twenty thousand, you'll throw it away in the first skin-game in 'Frisco, and hand it over to the first short-card sharp you'll meet. There's a thousand, enough for you to fling away, take it and get! Suppose what I'd said to you was the frozen truth, and you know'd it, would that have been the square thing to play on you?"
And he jumped off of the buckboard with his rifle and sixteen rounds of ammunition. In Prescott the woman told the story and a relief party rode out within a half-hour. They found the body of the short-card man and stock-thief with the bodies of fourteen Indians sprinkled about among the rocks.
"It's a skin game, and you might ez well expect to recover a gambling debt from a short-card sharp," explained Clinch; "Falkner oughter shot him on sight." "Or the boys lynched him," suggested Rawlins. "I think," said Hale, more reflectively, "that in the absence of legal remedy a man of that kind should have been forced under strong physical menace to give up his ill-gotten gains.
To his consternation he recognized Steptoe, Steptoe, whom he had not seen for five years until last night, when he had avoided him in the courtyard of the Boomville Hotel. His first instinct was to retreat, but it was too late. And the spirits had warmed him into temporary recklessness. "You ain't goin' to be backed down by a short-card gambler, are yer?" said Steptoe, with coarse familiarity.
He had become wild years before, and was now nothing more or less than a gambler, suspected of being a cheat and a "short-card operator." "He was a tinhorn, all right," said Wise, "and fer the life of me I don't know how a woman like Ma Thomas could have such a worthless rake fer a son. He was a queer-lookin' hombre one brown eye and one black eye." "Ma loves him, though.
"He's the one who is in trouble," she answered. "And he may think that I he does think something. He has lost his mine a very valuable property. Searle and some Mr. McCoppet have taken it away from Mr. Van Buren and all those poor old men after all their work, their waiting everything! You've got to help me to see what we can do!" "McCoppet's a gambler a short-card, tumble weed," said Glen.
Sometimes, however, the Apaches felt themselves forced to show respect for their dead enemies. There was, for instance, the short-card man from Prescott. Felix was his name; the surname may be chronicled somewhere for all the writer knows; it ought to be.
If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil possessed me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct and frank, if anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of my associations down town, where for so many months I had been dealing with the "short-card" crowd of high finance, who would hardly play the game straight even when that was the easy way to win.
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