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Whether or not some suspicion of his complicity with O'Hara had occurred to the authorities, he now found himself transferred to another "graft": from quarrying was set to trenching. Four things are inexhaustible in the earth: the hope of a gambler; the sea; the lip of a lover; and the capacity of Colmoor to be trenched and quarried. And in Hogarth's new gang was Fred Bates.
"Well, you watch out, anyhow. I'd sooner face McNamara an' all the crooks he can hire than that gambler." During the next few days Roy undertook to meet the proprietor of the Northern face to face, but the Kid had vanished completely from his haunts. He was not in his gambling-hall at night nor on the street by day.
Late in the afternoon he was awakened by a knocking at his door. He sprang out of bed and unlocked the door, and Dan Pennycook came into the room. "Hello, Dan" the gambler greeted him. "You look worried." "You would too, if you knew what I know" replied Pennycook. He sat down. "Harley, old man, you've laid violent hands on a mighty hard character."
The gambler was a man of so many and diverse peculiarities that it would be an impossibility to catalogue them with any degree of satisfactoriness. But, with the exception of his wholesale piratical methods at cards indeed, at any kind of gambling perhaps his most striking feature was his almost idolatrous worship for his horses.
The ordinary methods of accumulation are necessarily slow when competition is left free to regulate profits, while the gambler is spurred on by the hope of quickly realizing a large profit upon a small investment. It is not strange that many are charmed by the siren song of the stock ticker, but it means ruin, and to the extent that a man yields to the temptation his morals are weakened.
Or if they don't, and you don't, Heaven help you! As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best. You don't die of the complaint: or very few do. The generous wounded heart suffers and survives it. And he is not a man, or she a woman, who is not conquered by it, or who does not conquer it in his time.
They had seen a barber become a millionaire in a day because the company in which he had plunged had struck a gusher. They had seen the same man borrow five dollars three months later to carry him over until he got a job. Riches were pouring out of the ground for the gambler who would take a chance. Thrift was a much-discredited virtue in Malapi. The one unforgivable vice was to be "a piker."
But the storm had blown up with unusual swiftness. Even if the party had reached safety, the girl's troubles were not ended. With the coming of darkness her peril would increase. As long as Whaley was with West there was hope. The gambler was cold-blooded as a fish, but he had the saving sense of sanity.
"I don't see," my wife said, "any difference between the two cases stated and that of the stock gambler, whose unscrupulous operations have ruined thousands of people, who founds a theological seminary with the gains of his slippery transactions. By accepting his seminary the public condones his conduct. Another man, with the same shaky reputation, endows a college.
She spoke in a thoughtful and very serious tone. "Indeed, you need feel nothing of the kind." Sylvia Bailey put out her hand and took the other woman's hand in her own. She knew in her heart what Anna meant, but she wilfully pretended to misunderstand her. "You need never think that I run the slightest risk of becoming a gambler," she went on, a little breathlessly.
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