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Updated: June 5, 2025
Lankin, who played only a lawyer's rubber at whist, marked the salutary change in his friend's condition; and, for my part, I hope and pray that every honest reader of this volume who plays at M. Lenoir's table will lose every shilling of his winnings before he goes away. Where are the gamblers whom we have read of? Where are the card-players whom we can remember in our early days?
A negro boy sat holding a tomtom between his bare knees and beating it with supple hands, and a Jewess performed the stomach dance, waving two handkerchiefs stained red and purple, and singing in a loud and barbarous contralto voice which Domini could hear but very faintly. The card-players stopped their game and watched her, and Domini watched too.
Riggs sought his blanket first, and the fact was significant that he lay down some distance from the spruce shelter which contained Bo Rayner. Presently young Burt went off grumbling to his bed. And not long afterward the card-players did likewise. Snake Anson and Jim Wilson were left brooding in silence beside the dying camp-fire. The night was dark, with only a few stars showing.
The card-players had leaped to their feet and at a signal from Harlan they surged forward to the bar and formed a barrier between Johnny and his friends; and as they did so that puncher jerked at his gun, twisting to half face the crowd. At that instant fire and smoke spurted from Jerry's side coat pocket and the odor of burning cloth arose.
To her it seemed, however, but the arrangement of a kind destiny, and not daring to risk a delay till after tea, when conditions might not again so favour her, she left the work she had sat down to in the parlour after dinner, and tiptoeing through the hall, lest she should disturb the card-players in the squire's office, she secured her warmest wrap.
But it is difficult to be sulky with a bland, plump woman of thirty who remembers your childhood trick of biting your nails, and glances up at you from her embroidery, occasionally patting her brown silk hair or smoothing her brown silk waist in a way which implies a good digestion, a perfect memory of the morning's lesson of her Sunday-school class, and a mild disbelief in men as anything except relatives, providers, card-players, and nurslings.
As we broke suddenly in upon the card-players, Jason gave unequivocal signs of a disposition to conceal his hand, by thrusting the cards he held into his bosom, while he rapidly put the remainder of the pack under his thigh, pressing it down in a way completely to conceal it.
Among these shades of the cave an abode of the first men as it seemed I saw the hand start forth of him who existed on the spectacle of the fields and the sea, who was trying to show it and to seize it; or I saw around a vague halo four card-players stubbornly bent upon finding again something of an ancient and peaceful attachment in the faces of the cards; or I saw Margat flourish a Socialist paper that had fallen from Termite's pocket, and burst into laughter at the censored blanks it contained.
Sneed turned and stepped in. "Crazy as a hoot owl," he said as one of the card-players glanced up. Cheyenne picked up the dice and listened. He heard Sneed stepping heavily about the kitchen, and he heard an occasional and vivid exclamation from one of the card-players. He glanced at the distant edge of timber. He shook his head. "Can't make it!" he declared, and again he threw the dice.
In a hammock strung between two trees, a little way from the veranda, lay a woman, reading. Now and then a burst of shrill laughter broke the quiet of the surrounding forest. A man on the steps called a loud suggestive jest to the pair in the boat, and the woman waved her handkerchief in answer. The card-players argued and laughed over a point in their game.
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