“You’ve seen,” said Plegg shortly. “In a way, he’s the boss of this camp; has a reputation as a ‘killer’ and he has traded on it until he has everybody ‘buffaloed.’ He is the only faro dealer I’ve ever seen who would consent to run a game without a ‘lookout.’ He makes a brag of it; says all he needs is a boy to sell the chips. The woman is the only human being in this camp who has ever made him take a stand-off.” “The woman?” said David. “Yes; I keep forgetting that you’re new. She is another example of Dargin’s cave-man methods. When the work began here in the Gap last September, Dargin was about the first man on the ground for the shekel harvest. He opened this place and a dance-hall, killed a man or two to get himself properly dreaded, and began to rake in the easy money. About that time the woman dropped in.” “God pity her, whoever she is,” was David’s comment. “It was a curious case,” Plegg went on, as they walked together up a street blatant with the roistering crowds. “Shortly after the dissipations had caught their stride a young plunger from somewhere back east turned up here and took rooms in the Hophra House. As nearly as I could learn at the time, the young ass was rich--or at least a rich man’s son--and he had been stung on a Powder Can mining scheme. He came here to see what he’d been let in for, and he didn’t have any better sense than to bring his wife along--to such a wolf-den as this!” “Go on,” said David, with some dim premonition warning him that, instead, he should have told Plegg to stop. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of it; or just how much or how little the woman was to blame. But the upshot of the matter was that one day, right in the face and eyes of the whole camp, as you might say, Black Jack backed this young fool up against a wall, stuck a gun into his face, and gave him a quick choice between passing out there and then, or buying his life and a chance to vanish by giving up all claims to his wife.” “Good heavens!” the listener ejaculated. “Cave-man is right!” “One of the laws of the jungle that Kipling didn’t mention,” was the first assistant’s terse summing-up. “Dargin saw something that he wanted, and that was his way of reaching out and taking it. But now comes the queer part of it. The young plunger disappeared between two days, and everybody looked to see the woman take up with Dargin. But that isn’t what happened. She stayed on at the Hophra House for a few days and then sent for her father, a poor devil of a machinist who seemed to be trying to drink himself to death. Either she or Dargin got him a job at the Murtrie mine, and the two of them set up housekeeping in one of the mine shacks.” “Dargin and the woman, you mean?”