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You mean that because I'm back here to blaze a trail for you, you'll give up gambling, you'll give up hard drinking, and you'll never again molest harmless travellers or do thieving of any sort. Do you promise all this, Nick? Eh? Straight, now, do you promise it? I know you'll keep your word, once you give it. You're a desperado, but I don't think you would break your word."
With these they began shooting craps on the sidewalk in front of their office. Now gambling was taboo, hence the spectacle of two expensively dressed, eminently prosperous men squatting upon their heels with a stack of double eagles before them caused a sensation, and people halted to witness their impending arrest. Soon traffic was blocked.
And, conceiving such a condition, what would we say if the Standard Oil Company, in order to swell its revenues, not only permitted but officially encouraged opium smoking and gambling; if, in order to obtain labor for its plantations, it imported large numbers of ignorant blacks from Haiti and permitted the planters to hold those laborers, through indenture and indebtedness, in a form of servitude not far removed from slavery; if it authorized the punishment of recalcitrant laborers by flogging with the cat-o'nine-tails; if it denied to the natives as well as to the imported laborers a system of public education or a public health service or trial by jury; and finally, if, in the event of insurrection, it permitted its soldiery, largely recruited from savage tribes, to decapitate their prisoners and to bring their ghastly trophies into the capital and pile them in a pyramid in the principal plaza?
With your money in my pocket and the gambling fever in my pulses, I began even to believe it. And now I know that I am not. Good-bye, Mr. Draconmeyer. I don't blame you. On the whole, perhaps, you have behaved quite well. I think that you have chosen to behave well because that wonderful brain of yours told you that it gave you the best chance. That doesn't really matter, though."
But I know there was the devil of a row." "Do you know where he is?" I asked. Radnor shook his head. "I sent him some money once or twice, but my father found it out and shut down on my bank account. I've lost track of him lately he isn't in need of money though. The last I heard he was running a gambling place in Seattle." "It's a great pity!" I sighed. "He was a fine chap when I knew him."
Gambling and drinking were now the order of the day. Just as the ladies and gentlemen were assembling at the supper-table, the report of a pistol was heard in the direction of the Social Hall, which caused great uneasiness to the ladies, and took the gentlemen to that part of the cabin. However, nothing serious had occurred.
"Nay, Kingsley, I will lend you the money go with you, as you desire; but, understand me, I do not, no more than Edgerton, approve of this gambling." "Tut, tut! I don't want you to preach, though I could hear you with a devilish sight better temper than him. There's a hundred things that one's friend don't approve of, but shall he desert him for all that?
The old soldier will stiffen into double dignity at first, then give him a low wink, and end by sitting down and gambling. He will be cautious at starting, as one who opens trenches for the siege of Mammon; but soon the veteran will get heated, and give battle; he will fancy himself at Jena, since the croupiers are Prussians.
Telling her I had rather join the brigands in the hills of Lombardy than accept her gold, I at once turned my energies to writing speeches for members of Congress incapable of writing their own, and correcting the dictum of those made by men whose time was too much taken up at the gambling crib and drinking saloon.
And lordship's losses on the horse whose name he could hardly recall helped to a forcible illustration of the theory that drink and gambling mutually uphold and enforce each other.
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