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Updated: June 6, 2025
He made a pace forward and every man shrank a little away from him. "Because the cold in your blood is part hate and more fear, Black Gandil." The eyes of Gandil glared back for an instant. With all his soul he yearned for the courage to pull his gun, but his arm was numb; he could not move it, and his eyes wavered and fell.
"Because my blood runs cold in me when I look at you." Red Pierre grew rigid and straightened in a way they knew. "Damn you, Gandil, I've borne with you and your croaking too long, d'ye hear? Too long, and I'll hear no more of it, understand?" "Why not? You'll hear from me every time I sight you in the offing. You c'n lay to that!"
So they were apt to relapse into long silences unless Jack was with them, for being a woman her variety was infinite, or Pierre le Rouge, whom all except Black Gandil loved and petted, and feared. They were a battered crowd. Wind and hard weather and a thousand suns had marked them, and the hand of man had branded them.
Gandil, snarling from one side of his mouth, answered: "Where's Patterson?" "Am I responsible if the blockhead has got drunk someplace?" "Patterson doesn't get drunk not that way. And he knows that we were to start again today." "There ain't no doubt of that," commented Branch. "It's the straight dope. Patterson keeps his dates," said Bud Mansie.
Bud Mansie, meager, lean, with a shifting eye; Garry Patterson, of the red, good-natured face; Phil Branch, stolid and short and muscled like a giant; Handsome Dick Wilbur on his racing bay; Black Gandil, with his villainies from the South Seas like an invisible mantle of awe about him; and her father, the stalwart, gray Boone.
He's gone; he ain't just delayed; he's gone." It was not the first of these gloomy prophecies which Gandil had made, but each time a heavy gloom broke over Red Pierre.
In the largest habitable room they found a fire fed with rotten timbers from the wrecked portion of the building, and scattered through the room a sullen and dejected group: Mansie, Branch, Jim Boone, and Black Morgan Gandil. At a glance it was easy to detect their malady; it was the horrible ennui which comes to men who are always surrounded by one set of faces.
And Gandil, from the South Seas, growled with averted eyes: "This is the most fool stunt the chief has ever pulled." "Right, pal," answered Mansie. "You take a snake in out of the cold, and it bites you when it comes to in the warmth; but the chief has started, and there ain't nothing that'll make him stop, except maybe God or McGurk."
But Pierre, like a charmed man who dares to walk among lions, strolled easily through the room, and looked into the face of big Boone, who smiled faintly up to him, and Black Gandil, who scowled doubly dark, and Bud Mansie, who shifted uneasily in his chair and then nodded, and finally to Branch. He dropped a hand on the massive shoulder of the blacksmith. "Well?" he asked.
The others were tense, ready to spring for cover, but Boone reared up his great figure. "Don't answer him, Pierre. You, Gandil, shut your face or I'll break ye in two." The fierce eyes of Pierre le Rouge never wavered from his victim, but he answered: "Keep out of this. This is my party. I'll tell you why you'll stop gibbering, Gandil."
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