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Updated: June 9, 2025
The game went on as the others were going, silently and swiftly. The jack pot was opened, "boosted," and grew fat. Bedloe played a cool hand, and the impression until near the show-down was that he was not to be reckoned with. Then, a little impudently, as was his way, he shoved his pile to the centre of the table. "See that or drop out," he said curtly. The nervous man dropped out.
Thornton saw that Bedloe's hands were tense with tendons standing out sharply under the brown skin, the fingers rigid, curved inward a little, and not three inches from the grips of his guns. And Bedloe saw that Thornton carried a burning cigarette in his left hand, that his right, with thumb caught in the band of his chaps, was careless only in the seeming and that it, too, was alert and tense.
It was clear to him that any one of a dozen men, bearing a grudge against Charley Bedloe, but afraid to attack in the open any one of these three brothers who fought like tigers and who took up one another's quarrels with no thought of the right and the wrong of it, might have chosen this method. Yes, this was clear. But one thing was not.
"Withdraw your words, you dog," he said, "or I will cut your throat. I have but this moment landed at the river stairs and heard of this horrid business. If you say you have ever seen me before you lie most foully. Quick, you ferret. Will Bedloe suffers no man to charge his honour." The strong hands on his neck, the fierce eyes of the bravo, brought back Lovel's fear and with it his prudence.
"I don't say he's a saint, but he's run the town pretty well, on the whole, and kept the vice where it belongs, out of sight. He's made his pile, but he's entitled to something we all are. You always know where you stand with Beatty. But say, if Hubbell and his crowd " "Don't worry about Bedloe, he'll get called in, he'll come home to roost like the rest of them," said Mr. Plimpton, cheerfully.
He had gone a second time to the dugout at Poison Hole, carrying provisions enough to last Jimmie Clayton several days. Clayton seemed assured that Bedloe would look out for him now and insisted that there was danger of some of the range hands learning of Thornton's trips here.
It was a masterly stratagem Bedloe to start the ball, Prance to be accused as accomplice and then on his own account to give the other scoundrel corroboration. "Attend, you sir," the doctor shouted to Lovel. "Ye will be called to swear to the murderers whom this haanest man will name. If ye be a true Praatestant ye will repeat the laisson I taich you.
Encouraged by this general fury, the witnesses went still a step farther in their accusations; and though both Oates and Bedloe had often declared, that there was no other person of distinction whom they knew to be concerned in the plot, they were now so audacious as to accuse the queen herself of entering into the design against the life of her husband.
He was not in the plot, and yet the plotters did not trouble about him. They assumed his complaisance. Doubtless they knew his shabby past. He was roused by Oates' voice. The Doctor was arranging his plan of campaign with gusto. Bedloe was to disappear to the West Country till the time came for him to offer his evidence. Prance was to go about his peaceful trade till Bedloe gave him the cue.
Affluence had followed, and fame, and even that high office which the Judge himself had held, the Presidency of the State Bar Association. In all that time, one remark, which he had tried to forget, had cut him to the quick. Bedloe Hubbell had said on the political platform that Langmaid got one hundred thousand dollars a year for keeping Eldon Parr out of jail.
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