Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/108

94 jewellery till he'd sink like lead if he ever fell into the crick with all that metal on."

"You are speaking, sir, about a person who matters enormously," I rebuked him.

"If I hadn't been afraid of getting arrested I'd have shot him long ago."

"It's not done, sir," I said, quite horrified by his rash words.

"It's liable to be," he insisted. "I bet Ma Pettengill will go in with me on it any time I give her the word. Say, listen! there's one good mixer."

"The confirmed Mixer, sir?" For I remembered the term.

"The best ever. Any one can set into her game that's got a stack of chips." He uttered this with deep feeling, whatever it might exactly mean.

"I can be pushed just so far," he insisted sullenly. It struck me then that he should perhaps have been kept longer in one of the European capitals. I feared his brief contact with those refining influences had left him less polished than Mrs. Effie seemed to hope. I wondered uneasily if he might not cause her to miss her guess. Yet I saw he was in no mood to be reasoned with, and I retired to my bed which the blackamoor guard had done out. Here I meditated profoundly for some time before I slept.

Morning found our coach shunted to a siding at a backwoods settlement on the borders of an inland sea. The scene was wild beyond description, where quite almost anything might be expected to happen, though I was a bit reassured by the presence of a number of persons of both sexes who appeared to make little of the dangers by which