“Oh, I cheated you, did I? And you are going to kick out, are you? You’re a nice, innocent kid, you are! Now, see here: you have gone too far, a good deal too far, to back down; and, by God, you know too much! You are going to do just what you promised to do before we played this game, or I’ll give you dead away for what you did last night.--No, you don’t!--just keep your hands on the table right where they are! I’ve got the drop on you.” Silence for a leaden-winged half minute, and then Harding spoke again. “Are you going to do it, or not?” The boy’s voice was hoarse with passion. “I sha’n’t say anything as long as you hold that gun on me! Put it down, if you want me to talk to you.” Brant’s big jaw was set like a mastiff’s. The knob turned silently under his hand and the door swung noiselessly inward. The card room, with its red-brown walls of polished mahogany, was lighted by a single incandescent globe bracketted from the wainscoting at the right of the doorway. A square table stood in the midst. On the farther side of it sat the gambler, glaring up at the intruder, with mingled terror and ferocity yellowing his lean face and burning in his evil eyes, and with his right hand creeping by hairs’ breadths toward the revolver lying upon the table. The boy was on the nearer side of the table; he was half out of his chair, poising catlike for a spring, and at the instant of Brant’s entrance he pounced upon the weapon. Like a stone from a catapult Brant was upon them, smashing the globe of the bracket light in passing, and while one might draw a quick breath three pairs of hands clutched fiercely in the darkness for the weapon on the table. In the midst of the struggle--if that which has no duration in time can be said to have a middle part--came the crash of a pistol shot. There was a moment of ringing silence and darkness, broken by the clatter of a heavy weapon on the floor and a sudden burst of light from a suspended chandelier. Then, as if the light-burst had been a trumpet call to summon them, the attendants and _habitués_ of the place rallied quickly, filling the small room to overflowing. The first comers found Harding sitting bolt upright in his chair, with a clean-cut hole in his temple from which the blood was trickling in a thin stream. The boy was shrinking opposite, with his face averted and his hands held out before him as if to ward off a blow. Brant was leaning against the wainscoting near the broken lamp bracket, his arms folded and his gaze fixed upon the upturned face of the dead man. That was all, save that on the floor at Brant’s feet lay the big revolver with an empty shell in one chamber. CHAPTER XXV “SILENCE IS AN ANSWER TO A WISE MAN”