Bohemian Days | Page 6

and say his prayers. Freckle could see the old man now, with a tear poised on his tangled eyelashes, asking a farewell benediction from the front portico, upon himself departing, while every woolly-head was uncovered, and the whole assembled "property" had groaned "Amen" together.
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 dashing 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 fashion 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. God 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 sunshine, 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 lashing 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 class, six horses and daily; route of the second class, semi-weekly and four horses; third class, two horses and weekly; fourth class, one horse, one saddle, and one small boy.
The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to the