He waited.  Brokaw did not seem altogether like a drunken man now, and for a moment he feared that discovery had come.  He leaned over the table.  The watery film seemed to drop from his eyes for an instant and his teeth gleamed wolfishly.  David was glad the lamp chimney was black with soot, and that the rim of his hat shadowed his face, for it seemed to him that Brokaw’s vision had grown suddenly better.

“I should have killed him, an’ took her,” repeated Brokaw, his voice heavy with passion.  “I should have had her long ago, but Hauck’s woman kept her from me.  She’s been mine all along, ever since....”  His mind seemed to lag.  He drew his hulking shoulders back slowly.  “But I’ll have her to-morrow,” he mumbled, as if he had suddenly forgotten David and was talking to himself.  “To-morrow.  Next day we’ll start north.  Hauck can’t say anything now.  I’ve paid him.  She’s mine—­mine now—­to-night!  By....”

David shuddered at what he saw in the brute’s revolting face.  It was the dawning of a sudden, terrible idea.  To-night!  It blazed there in his eyes, grown watery again.  Quickly David turned out more liquor, and thrust one of the cups into Brokaw’s hand.  The giant drank.  His body sank into piggish laxness.  For a moment the danger was past.  David knew that time was precious.  He must force his hand.

“And if Hauck troubles you,” he cried, striking the table a blow with his fist, “I’ll help you settle for him, Brokaw!  I’ll do it for old time’s sake.  I’ll do to him what I did to the Breed.  The girl’s yours.  She’s belonged to you for a long time, eh?  Tell me about it, Brokaw—­tell me before Hauck comes!”

Could he never make that bloated fiend tell him what he wanted to know?  Brokaw stared at him stupidly, and then all at once he started, as if some one had pricked him into consciousness, and a slow grin began to spread over his face.  It was a reminiscent, horrible sort of leer, not a smile—­the expression of a man who gloats over a revolting and unspeakable thing.

“She’s mine—­been mine ever since she was a baby,” he confided, leaning again over the table.  “Good friend, give her to me, Mac—­good friend but a dam’ fool,” he chuckled.  He rubbed his huge hands together and turned out more liquor.  “Dam’ fool!” he repeated.  “Any man’s a dam’ fool to turn down a pretty woman, eh, Mac?  An’ she was pretty, he says. My girl’s mother, you know.  She must have been pretty.  It was off there—­in the bush country—­years ago.  The kid you brought in to-day was a baby then—­alone with her mother.  Ho, ho! deuced easy—­deuced easy!  But he was a darn’ fool!”

He drank with incredible slowness, it seemed to David.  It was torture to watch him, with the fear, every instant, that Hauck would come.

“What happened?” he urged.