e
men closed in behind him. When he sat down in a corner of the tavern
office and lighted his pipe his subalterns showed him deference by
leaving him to himself. That isolation gave Landlord Brophy his
opportunity to indulge his bent in gossip unheard by interlopers.

Brophy plucked a cigar from a box in the little case on the desk and sat
down beside Ward. "I sympathize with you," he said by way of backhanded
congratulation.

"Thank you."

"I was born in this tavern; my father built it and run it before me,"
said Brophy, tucking his cigar through the shrubbery of his gray
mustache. "And so I've had the chance to know Ech Flagg a good many
years. He's a turk."

"I have heard so."

"He has always had a razor edge to his temper. Maybe you know what put
the wire edge onto it?" It was query with the cock of an eyebrow
accompanying.

"What I know about Mr. Flagg is only a general reputation of being a
hard man. I can say that much to you because I told him the same thing.
And that's as far as I care to gossip about an employer," stated Ward,
stiffly.

"That's a safe stand," said Brophy, unperturbed. "Keep to it and they
can't be running to him with stories about what you have said. But he
don't pay me wages and I can say what I feel like saying. A new boss
ought to know a few things about the man who hires him. It's my
disposition to set a good chap on the right road with a tip. Whatever
you may say to Flagg in the way of chat, don't you ever try to bring up
the subject of his family affairs."

"I'm not at all likely to," snapped Latisan, with asperity.

"Oh, such a subject is easy out when folks get to going confidential,"
pursued the persistent Brophy. The suggestion that he would ever be on
confidential terms with Flagg provoked an ill-tempered rebuke from Ward,
but Brophy paid no attention.

"If you lose your job with him, as you probably will, Latisan, let it
be in the straight way of business, as he conducts it, instead of being
by some fool slip of your tongue about family matters." He puffed at his
cigar complacently and still was giving no heed to Ward's manifest
repugnance at being made the repository of gossip.

"Eck's wife died when the daughter Sylvia was small, and he sent the
girl off to school somewheres when she was big enough to be sent. And
she fell in with a dude kind of a fellow and came back home married to
him. She was so much in love that she dared to do a thing like that with
Eck Flag