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Aleck McTurpin, tired but exhilarated, rode toward the Windham rancho on the morning after Leidesdorff's ball. He had made a night of it and he was in high fettle. The Senorita Windham had granted him a dance despite her brother's scowling disapproval. Out of the charm of that brief association there had come into the gambler's mind a daring plan.
Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the language of any man. But I had more than an inkling that my husband had been taking a gambler's chance to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, all of a heap, that having taken the gambler's chance, we had met a fate not uncommon to gamblers, and had lost. "So we're bust!"
Ridiculous and childish as their contest might have seemed to a looker-on, to each the tension had been as great as that of the greatest gambler, without the gambler's trained restraint, coolness, and composure. Uncle Billy nervously took up the cards again. "Don't," said Uncle Jim gravely; "it's no use the luck's gone now." "Just one more deal," pleaded his partner.
But gambling does not, in that way, expose its victims. The gambler may be eaten up by the gambler's passion, yet only discover it by the greed in his eyes, the hardness of his features, the nervous restlessness, the threadbare coat, and his embarrassed business.
With a few more staccato yelps, the shivering black-and-tan retreated behind the gambler's legs. "Of all the ugly brutes I ever seen," said Parky, "that's the worst yellow flea-trap of the whole caboose." "Wal, I don't know," drawled Jim, as he patted his timid little pilgrim on the back in a way of comfort. "All dogs look alike to a flea, and I reckon Tintoretto is as good flea-feed as the next.
"Wouldn't the money do good as much good as any other hundred thousand dollars?" asked Margaret. "Perhaps. But the professorship was to bear his name, and what would be the moral effect of that?" "Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it without using the gambler's name?" "I am not saying yet what I advised. I am trying to get your views on a general principle."
With a stealthy movement the gambler suddenly reached forward, drawing a revolver from another man's holster. Ere the owner was aware of the loss of the weapon Duff took full aim at Tom Reade. Crack! It was the pistol of a deputy sheriff that spoke first. That officer had been the only one to detect the gambler's action, and he had fired instantly.
The gambler's line of reasoning was a wise one. In the chain of powerful circumstantial evidence that linked Donna Corblay to Bob McGraw, Mr. Hennage to travel far and fast. He went down to the station and purchased a ticket for Goldfield, Nevada. Goldfield was in the zenith of her glory about that time and Harley P. felt certain of a plethora of easy money in any booming mining camp.
In New York the game is always on, the tables always set: from the newsboy to the magnate the gambler's hope is open to every man. Only one thing disturbed his self-complacency, Margaret treated him indifferently, coldly. He even suspected that though by some accident she had borne him three children he had never won her love, that she had never been really his.
"At Leoben," he once said, in a gambler's metaphor, "I was playing twenty-one, and I had only twenty."
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