Page:Frank Packard - The Miracle Man.djvu/260

 his feet and looked down, "Doc, I got something I've been wanting to say to you for a week."

Madison still gazed at him apathetically—Pale Face Harry for the moment was as some unwarrantable apparition suddenly appearing before him.

Pale Face Harry raised his eyes, lowered them, kicked at a clod of earth with the toe of his boot—and raised his eyes again.

"Say," he blurted out, "I'm through, Doc. I'm—I'm going to quit."

Into Madison's stumbling brain leaped and took form but one idea—and he jumped forward, reaching savagely for Pale Face Harry's throat.

"You'd throw me, would you! You'd throw the game—would you!" he snarled, as his fingers locked.

Pale Face Harry, twisting, wriggled free—and retreated a step.

"No; I ain't!" he gasped—and then his sentences came tumbling out upon each other jerkily, as though he were trying to compress what he had to say into as few words as possible and as quickly as he could, while he watched Madison warily. "I ain't throwing nothing. I just want to quit myself. I keeps my mouth shut—see? I don't want none of the share what's coming. Say, I've got more'n a hundred times that out of it. Look at me, Doc! Say, I'm like a horse. That's the Patriarch and living honest. Say, in all me life I never knew what it was before till we comes here. If I took the dough what's