“Well, he was a wise gent. You ain't cut out for working, son. Not a bit. It'd be a shame to let you go to waste simply raising calluses on your hands.”
“You talk well,” sighed Terry, “but you can't convince me.”
“Convince you? Hell, I ain't trying to convince your father's son. You're like Black Jack. You got to find out yourself. We was with a Mick, once. Red-headed devil, he was. I says to Black Jack: 'Don't crack no jokes about the Irish around this guy!'
“'Why not?' says your dad.
“'Because there'd be an explosion,' says I.
“'H'm,' says Black Jack, and lifts his eyebrows in a way he had of doing.
“And the first thing he does is to try a joke on the Irish right in front of the Mick. Well, there was an explosion, well enough.”
“What happened?” asked Terry, carried away with curiosity.
“What generally happened, kid, when somebody acted up in front of your dad?” From the air he secured an imaginary morsel between stubby thumb and forefinger and then blew the imaginary particle into empty space.
“He killed him?” asked Terry hoarsely.
“No,” said Denver, “he didn't do that. He just broke his heart for him. Kicked the gat out of the hand of the poor stiff and wrestled with him. Black Jack was a wildcat when it come to fighting with his hands. When he got through with the Irishman, there wasn't a sound place on the fool. Black Jack climbed back on his horse and threw the gun back at the guy on the ground and rode off. Next we heard, the guy was working for a Chinaman that run a restaurant. Black Jack had taken all the fight out of him.”
That scene out of the past drifted vividly back before Terry's eyes. He saw the sneer on the lips of Black Jack; saw the Irishman go for his gun; saw the clash, with his father leaping in with tigerish speed; felt the shock of the two strong bodies, and saw the other turn to pulp under the grip of Black Jack.
By the time he had finished visualizing the scene, his jaw was set hard. It had been easy, very easy, to throw himself into the fierceness of his dead father's mood. During this moment of brooding he had been looking down, and he did not notice the glance of Denver fasten upon him with an almost hypnotic fervor, as though he were striving to reach to the very soul of the younger man and read what was written there. When Terry looked up, the face of his companion was as calm as ever.
“And you're like the old boy,” declared Denver. “You got to find out for yourself. It'll be that way with this work idea of yours. You've lost one job. You'll lose the next one. But—I ain't advising you no more!”
CHAPTER 21
Terry left the hotel more gloomy than he had been even when he departed from the ranch that morning. The certainty of Denver that he would find it impossible to stay by his program of honest work had made a strong impression upon his imaginative mind, as though the little safecracker really had the power to look into the future and into the minds of men. Where he should look for work next, he had no idea. And he balanced between a desire to stay near the town and work out his destiny there, or else drift far away. Distance, however, seemed to have no barrier against rumor. After two days of hard riding, he had placed a broad gap between himself and the Cornish ranch, yet in a short time rumor had overtaken him, casually, inevitably, and the force of his name was strong enough to take away his job.
Standing in the middle of the street he looked darkly over the squat roofs of the town to the ragged mountains that marched away against the horizon—a bleak outlook. Which way should he ride?
A loud outburst of curses roared behind him, a whip snapped above him, he stepped aside and barely from under the feet of the leaders as a long team wound by with the freight wagon creaking and swaying and rumbling behind it. The driver leaned from his seat in passing and volleyed a few crackling remarks in the very ear of Terry. It was strange that he did not resent it. Ordinarily he would have wanted to, climb onto that seat and roll the driver down in the dust, but today he lacked ambition. Pain numbed him, a peculiar mental pain. And, with the world free before him to roam in, he felt imprisoned.
He turned. Someone was laughing at him from the veranda of the hotel and pointing him out to another, who laughed raucously in turn. Terry knew what was in their minds. A man who allowed himself to be cursed by a passing teamster was not worthy of the gun strapped at his thigh. He watched their faces as through a cloud, turned again, saw the door of the gambling hall open to allow someone to come out, and was invited by the cool, dim interior. He crossed the street and passed through the door.
He was glad, instantly. Inside there was a blanket of silence; beyond the window the sun was a white rain of heat, blinding and appalling. But inside his shoes took hold on a floor moist from a recent scrubbing and soft with the wear of rough boots; and all was dim, quiet, hushed.
There was not a great deal of business in the place, naturally, at this hour of the day. And the room seemed so large, the tables were so numerous, that Terry wondered how so small a town could support it. Then he remembered the mine and everything was explained. People who dug gold like dirt spent it in the same spirit. Half a dozen men were here and there, playing in what seemed a listless manner, save when you looked close.
Terry slumped into a big chair in the darkest corner and relaxed until the coolness had worked through his skin and into his blood. Presently he looked about him to find something to do, and his eye dropped naturally on the first thing that made a noise—roulette. For a moment he watched the spinning disk. The man behind the table on his high stool was whirling the thing for his own amusement, it seemed. Terry walked over and looked on.
He hardly knew the game. But he was fascinated by the motions of the ball; one was never able to tell where it would stop, on one of the thirty-six numbers, on the red or on the black, on the odd or the even. He visualized a frantic, silent crowd around the wheel listening to the click of the ball.
And now he noted that the wheel had stopped the last four times on the odd. He jerked a five-dollar gold piece out of his pocket and placed it on the even. The wheel spun, clicked to a stop, and the rake of the croupier slicked his five dollars away across the smooth-worn top of the table.
How very simple! But certainly the wheel must stop on the even this time, having struck the odd five times in a row. He placed ten dollars on the even.
He did not feel that it was gambling. He had never gambled in his life, for Elizabeth Cornish had raised him to look on gambling not as a sin, but as a crowning folly. However, this was surely not gambling. There was no temptation. Not a word had been spoken to him since he entered the place. There was no excitement, no music, none of the drink and song of which he had heard so much in robbing men of their cooler senses. It was only his little system that tempted him on.
He did not know that all gambling really begins with the creation of a system that will beat the game. And when a man follows a system, he is started on the most cold-blooded gambling in the world.
Again the disk stopped, and the ball clicked softly and the ten dollars slid away behind the rake of the man on the stool. This would never do! Fifteen dollars gone out of a total capital of fifty! He doubled with some trepidation again. Thirty dollars wagered. The wheel spun—the money disappeared under the rake.