Carhart stepped out at the rear of the tent and stood waiting. Four or five shadowy figures slipped into view, caught sight of him, and paused. While they stood huddled together he made out a pair of broad shoulders towering above the group. There was only one such pair in the camp, and they belonged to the cook, Jack Flagg. The silence lasted only a moment. Then, without speaking, the men broke and ran back into the darkness. Carhart waited until the camp was silent, then he too, went in and to sleep. But Young Van, dozing lightly and restlessly, was awakened by the noise behind the tents. For a few moments he lay still, then he got up and looked out. Down the knoll he could see a dim light, and after a little he made it out as coming from the mess tent of the laborers. Now and then a low murmur of voices floated up through the desert stillness. Young Van folded up the legs of his cot, carried it out, laid it across two of the water barrels, and went to sleep there in the open air. An hour later the mess tent was still lighted. Within, seated on blocks of timber around a cracker-box, four men were playing poker; and pressing about them was a score of laborers--all, in fact, who could crowd into the tent. The air was foul with cheap tobacco and with the hundred odors that cling to working clothes. The eyes of the twenty or more men were fixed feverishly on the greasy cards, and on the heaps of the day’s pay-slips. By a simple process of elimination the ownership of these slips had been narrowed down to the present players--Jack Flagg, his assistant Charlie, Dimond, and a Mexican. The silence carried a sense of strain. The occasional coarse jokes and boisterous laughter died down with strange suddenness. “It’s no use,” said Flagg, finally, tossing the cards on the box; “they’re against us.” The Mexican rose at this, and sullenly left the tent. Dimond, with a conscious laugh, gathered in two-thirds of the slips and pocketed them. It was an achievement to clean out Jack Flagg. The remaining third went to Charlie. Flagg leaned back, clasped his great knotted hands about one knee, and looked across at Dimond. Six feet and a third tall in his socks, hard as steel rails, he could have lifted any two of the laborers about him clear of the ground, one in each hand. The lower part of his face was half covered with his long, ill-kept mustache and the tuft of hair beneath his under lip. The blue shirt he wore had unmistakably come from a military source, but not a man there, not even Charlie--himself nearly a match for his chief in height and breadth--would have dared ask when he had been in the army, nor why or how he had come to leave it. “Dimond,” said Flagg, “let me have one of those slips a minute.” The nervous light left Dimond’s eyes. He threw a suspicious glance across the box; then, after a moment, he complied. Flagg held the slip near the lantern and examined it. “Eighty cents,” he muttered, “eighty cents--and for how much work?”