Fifteen or twenty minutes had passed when he heard steps in the hallway.  He knew it was Gilmore returning, but the gambler was not alone; Montgomery heard him speak to his companion as a key was fitted to the lock.  The door swung open and Gilmore, followed by Marshall Langham, entered the room.

“Here’s the drunken hound, Marsh!” said the gambler.

“For God’s sake, boss, let me out of this!” cried Montgomery, addressing himself to Langham.

“Yes, we will—­like hell!” said Gilmore.  “By rights we ought to take you down to the creek, knock you in the head and heave you in—­eh, Marsh?  That’s about the size of what we ought to do!”

Langham’s face was white and drawn with apprehension, yet he surveyed the ruin the gambler had wrought with something like pity.

“Why, what’s happened to him, Andy?” he asked.

His companion laughed brutally.

“Oh, I punched him up some, I couldn’t keep my hands off him, I only wonder I didn’t kill him—­”

“Let me out of this, boss—­” whined the handy-man.

“Shut up, you!” said the gambler roughly.

He drew back his hand, but Langham caught his arm.

“Don’t do that, Andy!” he said.  “He isn’t in any shape to stand much more of that; and what’s the use, the harm’s done!”

The gambler scowled on his cousin Joe with moody resentment.

“All the same I’ve got a good notion to finish the job!” he said.

“Let me go home, boss!” entreated Montgomery, still addressing himself to Langham.  “God’s sake, he pretty near killed me!”

He stood up on shaking legs.

Wretched, abject, his uneasy glance shifted first from one to the other of his patrons, who were now his judges, and for aught he knew would be his executioners as well.  The gambler glared back at him with an expression of set ferocity which told him he need expect no mercy from that source; but with Langham it was different; he at least was not wantonly brutal.  The sight of physical suffering always distressed him and Joe’s bruised and bloody face was more than he could bear to look at.

“For two cents I’d knock him on the head!” jerked out Gilmore.

“Oh, quit, Andy; let him alone!  I want to ask him a question or two,” said Langham.

“You’ll never know from him what he said or didn’t say—­you’ll learn that from the judge himself,” and Gilmore laughed harshly.

A minute or two passed before Langham could trust himself to speak.  When he did, he turned to Montgomery to ask: 

“I wish you’d tell me as nearly as you can what you said to my father?”

“I didn’t go there to tell him anything, boss; he just got it out of me.  What chance has a slob like me with him?”

“Got what out of you?” questioned Langham in a low voice.

“Well, he didn’t get much, boss,” replied Montgomery, shaking his head.

“But what did you tell him?” insisted Langham.