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Whitman had follered minin' till his wife died, an' then he got to speculatin' in stocks, finally gettin' cleaned out full an' proper, an' then he started to gamblin' in earnest. It was from him that Jim had picked up most of his idees about business an' gamblin'. When Whitman himself had died he had turned Barbie's mother over to Jim.
Well, I've been dodgin' all round every where since then, but never forgettin' little Min, mind you, and at last I found myself here, all right. I'd been speculatin' in wines and raisins, and just dropped in here to take pot-luck with some old Zouave friends, when, darn me! if they didn't make me stay. It seems there's squally times ahead. They wanted a live man. They knew I was that live man.
Folks are tradin' and speculatin' in stock and royalty rights that never could amount to a hill o' beans. Slick promoters are gettin' rich. I've known photographers to fake gushers in their dark-rooms. The country's full of abandoned wells of busted companies. Oil is a big man's game. It takes capital to operate.
"Seben times," answered Honest Moses, and chuckled. "Mistah Sheldrake done sell me fo' cash, plunk down; I fugitives back to him, and he done sell me agin fo' mo' cash. I gits mo' money out o' speculatin' in dis heah darky, dan Scipio and Dan'l can git ahookin' watermillions fo' a hundred yeahs." Nine Eyes took up his dropped theme.
"She knows that. She knows you're poor, all right. I heard Aunt Lucinda tell her often. She said you was rich once, an' lost it all, speculatin' in a mine or something; an' what was the use marryin' a man who hadn't anything? I don't know, but I think that was why Aunt Lucinda worked up this trip with Mr. Davidson.
And there was a rich squire, who made his money by speculatin' in wickedness, and a mortgage, and I don't know what all. And those Cape Cod folks! and the houses they lived in! and the way they talked! Oh, dear! oh, dear! I got my money's wuth that afternoon." "What about the wreck? How did that happen?" "Don't know. It happened 'cause it had to be in the play, I cal'late.
That comes of your speculatin to Lowell; and, I vow, them factorin towns will corrupt our youth of both sexes, and become hotbeds of iniquity. Evil communications endamnify good manners, as sure as rates; one scabby sheep will infect a whole flock vice is as catchin as that nasty disease the Scotch have, it's got by shakin hands, and both eend in the same way in brimstone.
"There's one thing I want to tell ye, J'rome, and I want ye to remember it," Jake Noyes had said, "and that is, a doctor had ought to be like jurymen he'd ought to be sworn in to be unprejudiced when he goes to see a patient, just as a juryman is when he goes to court. If you don't know what ails 'em, don't ye go to speculatin', as to what 'tis an' what ye'll do, on the way there.
"Yon puir lassie's feyther, no content wi' bein' just a plain man like ony ither miller, must needs try to mak a big fortune, and some o' thae speculatin' deils I canna ca' them by ony ither name got hand o' the auld man, an' ae fine day his fortune's awa the vera hoose he's livin' in no his ain, a' signed awa, an' he in debt.
What could he do against a single-track mind with such driving force back of it? Had Kirby got anything of importance on James? Or was he bluffing? "Talk 's cheap," he sneered uneasily. "You'll find how cheap it is. James had been speculatin'. He was down an' out. Another week, an' he'd have been a bankrupt. Uncle discovers how he's been tricked by him an' Miss Harriman.
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