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Updated: May 14, 2025
As he went, by day or night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat to bow here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard, pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were picked.
With less talent and more cunning, he might have become a very rich man, at short notice; but being brought up in an old-fashioned school of morality, he could never learn to dignify swindling by the epithet of smartness, nor consider overreaching his neighbor a "fair business transaction."
Such humor as they have, too, is of the coarsest kind, and is expressed chiefly in rude practical jokes, or the bloody overreaching of the poor thick-headed Trolls, who are the butts of the stories and the victims of their heroes. There is good ethnological and mythological reason why the Trolls should be butts and victims, it is true; but that is not to the present purpose.
Yet, truly, my reason doth say likewise; for there did oft drip water upon me out of the darkness, even though I walked in the middle way of the Gorge; and how should this thing be, save that there went an overreaching of the sides, that should let the mildew down upon me.
Having thus arranged business for the morrow to their satisfaction, these astute personages, who, like their party generally in America, at that period, seemed to have acted on an entirely false estimate of the intelligence and spirit of the common people, now rose and retired to their respective lodgings, inwardly chuckling at their sagacity, in being able to concoct what they believed would prove a successful scheme of overreaching and putting down their opponents, and, at the same time, of establishing their own tottering authority on a basis which might bid defiance to all future attempts to overturn it.
And the more expert they are in skillfully and artfully contriving devices from within for overreaching their companions the more evil are their works. And the more expert they are in bringing such devices into effect under the pretense of sincerity, justice, and piety, the more evil still are their works.
Even while quite a child, when present at a conference between the two kings under the Elm of Gisors, he was shrewd enough to perceive that Henry was unjustly overreaching his father, and surprised all present by exclaiming, "Sir, you do my father wrong. I perceive that you always gain the advantage over him.
It seemed reasonable to them that men lived together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while a society that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, there would be little chance for one based on the idea of cooperation for the benefit of all.
"You'd be slow to tell me I couldn't count on you, Tom, and you'd be slow to think I couldn't manage this thing when the time's ripe for it!" But no trace of this all-sufficient sense of confidence, of which he seemed so certain, showed on Ware's hardened visage. He spat away the stump of his cigar. "Sure as God, John Murrell, you are overreaching yourself!
Wealth flowed in upon him with extraordinary rapidity not in the regular course of trade, overreaching and unscrupulous as he was in dealing, but through what are called fortunate speculations.
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