Part 2 (1/2)

That was patriarchal life; what was this? Freckle thought this much finer and higher. He had not asked himself if it was better. He was rather ashamed of his father now, and anxious to be a das.h.i.+ng gentleman, like Plade or Pisgah.

Why did he play whist so badly? How chanced it that, having dwelt eighteen months in Paris, he could speak no French? His only _grisette_ had both robbed him and been false to him. He knew that the Colony tolerated him, merely. Was he indeed verdant, as they had said--obtuse, stupid, lacking wit?

After all, he repeated to himself, what had the Colony done for him? He had not now twenty francs to his name, and was a thousand francs in debt; he had essayed to study medicine, but balked at the first lesson.

Yet, though these suggestions, rather than convictions, occurred to him, they stirred no latent ambition. If he had ever known one high resolution, the Southern Colony had pulled it up, and sown the place with salt.

So he reached Master Lees' tenement; it was a long ascent, and toward the last stages perilous; the stairs had a fas.h.i.+on of curving round unexpectedly and bending against jambs and blank walls. He was quite out of breath when he staggered against Lees' door and burst it open.

The light fell almost glaringly upon the bare, contracted chamber; for this was next to the sky and close up to the clouds, and the window looked toward the west, where the sun, sinking majestically, was throwing its brightest smiles upon Paris, as it bade adieu.

And there, upon his tossed, neglected bed, in the full blaze of the sunset, his sharp, sallow jaws dropped upon his neck, his cheeks colorless and concave, his great eyes open wide and his hair unsmoothed, Master Lees lay dead, with the roulette table upon his breast!

When Freckle had raised himself from the platform at the base of the first flight of stairs, down which he had fallen in his fright, he hastened to his own chamber and gave the Colony notice of the depletion of its number.

A deep gloom, as may be surmised, fell upon all. Lees had been no great favorite of late, and it had been the trite remark for a year that he was looking like death; but at this juncture the tidings came ominously enough. One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never share the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he had prophesied the failure of ”the system.”

His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had known him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy.

Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it; but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and think.

They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling, even after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their companion to go unhonored to its grave; separately they wished to do so--in community they were ashamed; and Pisgah had half a hope that somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly:

”The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. G.o.d knows which of us will take the next turn.”

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the light of an influential spirit.

IV.

THE DESPERATE CHANCE.

During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France, thinking as little of the suns.h.i.+ne, and the harvesters of flax, and the turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were Arkansas, and he were las.h.i.+ng the rump of the ”off” horse, as he had done for the better part of his life.

Risque's uncle had been a great Mississippi jobber; he took U. S. postal contracts for all the unknown world; route of the first cla.s.s, six horses and daily; route of the second cla.s.s, semi-weekly and four horses; third cla.s.s, two horses and weekly; fourth cla.s.s, one horse, one saddle, and one small boy.

The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never be faithfully said to have learned to _walk_; and recalls, as the first incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives, teaching him to play old sledge on the cus.h.i.+ons of a Was.h.i.+ta stage.

Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. 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” s.h.i.+ed 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.

His whole life might have been called a game of cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles--stocks, shares, currency--but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game.

There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at his fingers-ends.

It was his favorite theory that there was method in what seemed chance; principles underlying luck; measures for infinity; clues to all combinations.

Given one pack of cards, one man to shuffle, one to cut, one to deal, and fair play, and it was yet possible to know just how many times in a given number of games each card would fall to each man.

Given a roulette circle of one hundred numbered s.p.a.ces and a blindfolded man to spin the ball; it could be counted just how many times in one thousand said ball would come to rest upon any one number.