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Updated: June 28, 2025
He would be a constant embarrassment to them all, for they would feel that they'd have to be nice to him in return for what he had done for them. The thought made the mucker sick. "I'd rather croak," he murmured.
As he paid the waiter from a well-filled pocketbook he looked up to meet Billy's eyes upon him. With a drunken smile he beckoned to the mucker to join them. Billy felt that Fate was overkind to him, and he lost no time in heeding her call. A moment later he was sitting at the table with the three sailors, and had ordered a drop of red-eye. The stranger was very lavish in his entertainment.
But the girl only smiled up bravely into his face and kept her place beside him. The mucker tried to push her behind him with one hand while he fought with the other, but she drew away from him to come up again a little farther from him. The samurai were pushing them closely now. Three men at a time were reaching for the mucker with their long swords.
Then they turned to their flight again up the wild face of the savage mountain. The moon came up at last to lighten the way for them, but it was a rough and dangerous climb at best. In many places they were forced to walk hand in hand for considerable distances, and twice the mucker had lifted the girl bodily in his arms to bear her across particularly dangerous or difficult stretches.
The first of the samurai into the little room was cleft from crown to breast bone with the keen edge of the sword of the Lord of Yoka wielded by the mighty arm of the mucker. The second took the count with a left hook to the jaw, and then all that could crowd through the little door swarmed upon the husky bruiser from Grand Avenue.
She was an instant too late to save, but just in time to avenge scarcely had the samurai's sword touched the mucker than the point of Oda Yorimoto's short sword, wielded by the fair hand of Barbara Harding, plunged into his heart. With a shriek he collapsed beside the body of his victim. Barbara Harding threw herself beside Byrne. Apparently life was extinct.
They stood for a moment, then wavered, turned and fled from the hut. When Theriere turned back toward Barbara Harding he found her kneeling beside the mucker. "Is he dead?" asked the Frenchman. "No. Can we lift him together and get him through that window?" "It is the only way," replied Theriere, "and we must try it."
He wanted to hear more, and as Billy was not handicapped by any overly refined notions of the ethics which frown upon eavesdropping he lost no time in transferring the scene of his labors to a point sufficiently close to one of the cabin ports to permit him to note what took place within. What the mucker beard of that conversation made him prick up his ears.
"I don't belong," said the mucker gruffly. "Wouldn't you rather belong?" insisted the girl. All his life Billy had looked with contempt upon the hated, pusillanimous highbrows, and now to be asked if he would not rather be one! It was unthinkable, and yet, strange to relate, he realized an odd longing to be like Theriere, and Billy Mallory; yes, in some respects like Divine, even.
Oh, what a laugh there'll be in Gridley, among the mucker part of the population, when they find that I'm not class president, but that Dick Prescott is!" Even after he lay in bed, following taps, Bert Dodge could not sleep. He lay tossing restlessly, dark thoughts surging through his mind. "No place on earth seems large enough for Dick Prescott and me together!" muttered Dodge in the dark.
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