b9bd780c9c95 Administrator (the red fox clan .txt) 📖

at what he chose to consider a competition in assininity between his two old friends, turned from them to Betty with some trivial remark. As he spoke he was contrasting her with the splendid Zoraida and had he voiced the comparison Zoraida must have whitened with anger and mortification while Betty flushed up, startled. He would have said; "One is like a poison serpent and the other like a flower." But instead of that he merely said:

"And how have you spent the long day, Miss Betty?"

Betty raised her head and looked at him steadily. A flower? Quickly, even before she spoke, he amended that. A girl, rather; a girl with a mind of her own and a sorching [Transcriber's note: scorching?] hot temper and her utterly human moments of unreasonableness. Her glance meant to cut and did cut. Her voice was serene, cool and contemptuous.

"I do not require to be amused, thank you," she said.

"Amused?" demanded Kendric, puzzled equally by words and expression.

"I am here against my will," she explained. "You are among your chosen friends. To entertain me you need not deny yourself the pleasure of their delightful conversation."

"You know better than that," he said sharply. "If you don't care to talk with me----"

"I don't," said Betty.

Kendric reddened angrily. He opened his lips for the retort he meant to make; then instead gulped down his wine and sat back glowering. After having been fool enough to worry over her all day long to be told to hold his tongue now set him to forming sweeping and denunciatory generalizations concerning her entire sex. Well, he wanted matters simplified and here came the desired solution. Betty could forage for herself, could go to the devil if she liked, he told himself bluntly.

Before the night passed he meant to make a break for the open and, thank God, he'd go alone. As a man should, with no woman around his neck. Because a girl had hurt him he chose now to pretend to himself that he was glad to be rid of her.

After that, during the meal, both Jim and Betty sat for the most part silent and Rios, nursing his mustache and watching all that went forward, had little to say. On the other hand Zoraida and Bruce and Barlow made the dinner hour lively with their talk. Skilled in her management of men, Zoraida had never shown greater genius for holding two red blooded, ardent men in leash. She threw favors to each side of her; a tumbled rose from her hair was loot for the sailorman who at the moment was of a mood to forget other greater and more golden loot for the scented, wilting petals; a bracelet coming undone was for Bruce's eager fingers to fasten. And always when she looked at one man with a kiss in her oblique eyes her head was turned so that the other man might not see. Kendric she ignored.

"The same old story of good men gone wrong," philosophized Kendric.

"Let a man get a woman in his head and he's no earthly good." And, in his turn, he ignored Betty. Or at least assured himself that he did so.

But Betty, being Betty, though for the most part her eyes seemed downcast, knew that the man at her side thought of little but her own exasperating self. She did a good bit of speculating upon Jim Kendric; she was perplexed and uncertain; when he was not observing she shot many a curious sidelong look at him.

"Miss Zoraida is about due to overreach herself," thought Kendric.

"She can't drive Barlow and Bruce tandem."

But Zoraida appeared to feel no uneasiness. As the meal went on and meats and fruits were served and other vintages poured and coffee set bubbling over a tiny alcohol flame on the table, her spirits rose and she dared anything. She was sure of herself and of her destiny and of her dominance over the pleasureable situation. Bruce's eyes and Barlow's clashed like knives, but when they met hers softened and worshiped.

At the end of the meal, when they rose, Zoraida cried: "Wait!" At her signal her servants swiftly lifted the table and carried it out through the double doors. Another smaller table was brought in; a man came to Zoraida with a small steel box. She took it laughing, and laughing spilled its contents out upon the table so that gold pieces rolled jingling across the polished top and some fell to the floor. With her own hands she carelessly divided the gold into four nearly equal piles.

"For my guests!" she told them lightly. She took from the servant's hands a deck of cards and tossed it down among the minted gold. "I would watch such men as you four play for the whole stake. And," she added more slowly, her burning look embracing them all but lingering upon Jim Kendric, "I have a curiosity to know who of you in my house is the most favored of the gods!"

"There's a goodly pile there, Señorita," said Barlow who could never look upon gold without hungering. "You mean it all goes to the man who wins? And you don't play?"

"All that," she answered him steadily, "goes to the man who wins. With perhaps much more? Who knows?"

Bruce stepped eagerly to the table where already Barlow was before him with a heap of the gold drawn up to his hand. Ruiz Rios took his place indifferently, affecting a look of ennui. Kendric held back. Betty, aloof from them all, looked about her as though to escape. But at each door, as though forbidding exit, stood one of Zoraida's men.

"You yourself do not play?" Barlow asked of Zoraida.

"This time, my friend," she replied, "I am content to watch."

Content rather, thought Kendric, to amuse herself by stirring up more bad blood among friends. For the look he saw on her face was one of pure malicious mischief. It occurred to him that she had sorrowed not at all over the taking off of Escobar