Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
But then this was Julia's brother, and there was nothing he would not do for Julia. So, sometime after the mud-clerk had ceased to speak, the striker gave utterance to both impulses by replying, "He's no friend of mine," a little crisply, and then softly adding, "Though I shouldn't like to see him fleeced."
The striker talked with the mud-clerk, but watched the throng of passengers who drank with each other at the bar, smoked in the "social hall," read and wrote at the tables in the gentlemen's cabin, or sat with doffed hats and chatted gallantly in the ladies' cabin, which was visible as a distant background, seen over a long row of tables with green covers and under a long row of gilded wooden stalactites, which were intended to be ornamental.
He bet every cent. Then he lost his watch, and at half-past one o'clock he went to his state-room, stripped of all loose valuables, and sweating great drops. And the mud-clerk, who was still in the office, remarked to himself, with a pleasant chuckle, that it was good for him; he declared it was; teach the fellow to let monte alone, and keep his eyes peeled when he traveled. It would so!
August acted with his eyes open to all the perils from gamblers' pistols and gamblers' malice; and after he had started to interfere, the mud-clerk called him back, and said, in his half-indifferent way: "Looky here, Gus, don't be a blamed fool. That's a purty little game. That greeny's got to learn to let blacklegs alone, and he don't look like one that'll take advice.
The confused murmur of many voices, mixed with the merry tinkling of the glass pendants, gave the whole an air of excitement. But the striker did not see the man he was looking for. "Who got on at Cairo? I think I saw a man from our part of the country," he said. "I declare, I don't know," said the mud-clerk, who drawled his words in a cold-blooded way. "Let me look.
It was natural enough that the "mud-clerk" on the old steamboat Iatan should take a fancy to the "striker," as the engineer's apprentice was called. Especially since the striker know so much more than the mud-clerk, and was able to advise him about many things.
It was not the gambler who got aground that morning. He had yet other nice little games, with three cards or more or none, to play. It was not the mud-clerk who ran aground good, non-committal soul, who never look sides where it would do him any harm, and who never worried himself about anything.
By this time a new actor had appeared on the scene in the person of a man with a black mustache and side-whiskers, who took a seat behind a card-table near the bar. "H'llo!" said the mud-clerk in a low and lazy voice, "Parkins is back again. After his scrape at Paducah last February, he disappeared, and he's been shady ever since. He's growed whiskers since, so's not to be recognized.
The mate and then the captain came rushing into the engine-room. Munson was discharged at once, and the striker was promised engineer's wages. Gus went off watch at this moment, and the mud-clerk said to him, in his characteristically indifferent voice, "Such luck, I declare! I was sure you would be dismissed for meddling with Parkins, and here you are promoted, I declare!"
He is only splurging round to start up the greenies." And the mud-clerk spoke with an indifference and yet a sort of dilettante interest in the game that shocked his friend, the striker. "Why don't they set these blacklegs ashore?" said August, whose love of justice was strong. "You tell," drawled the mud-clerk. He can set them off whenever he wants to."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking