Friday, the Thirteenth | Page 4

thousand capital, and I want to feel that I'm free to kick my heels until I
have raked together an even million all of my own making; then I'll
settle down with you, old man, and hold my handle of the plough, and
if some good girl happens along about that time--well, then it will be
'An ivy-covered little cot' for mine."
He laughed, and I laughed too. Bob was looked upon by all his friends
as a bad case of woman-shy. No woman, young or old, who had in any
way crossed Bob's orbit but had felt that fascination, delicious to all
women, in the presence of:
A soul by honour schooled, A heart by passion ruled--
but he never seemed to see it. As my wife--for I had been three years
married and had two little Randolphs to show that both Katherine Blair
and I knew what marriage was for--never tired of saying, "Poor Bob!
He's woman-blind, and it looks as though he would never get his sight
in that direction."
"Then again, Jim," he continued in a tone of great seriousness, "there's
a little secret I have never let even you into. The truth is I am not safe
yet--not safe to speak for the old house of Randolph & Randolph. Yes,
you may laugh--you who are, and always have been, as staunch and
steady as the old bronze John Harvard in the yard, you who know
Monday mornings just what you are going to do Saturday nights and all
the days and nights in between, and who always do it. Jim, I have
found since I have been over on the floor that the Southern gambling
blood that made my grandfather, on one of his trips back from New
York, though he had more land and slaves than he could use, stake his

land and slaves--yes, and grandmother's too--on a card-game, and--lose,
and change the whole face of the Brownley destiny--those same
gambling microbes are in my blood, and when they begin to claw and
gnaw I want to do something; and, Jim"--and the big brown eyes
suddenly shot sparks--"if those microbes ever get unleashed, there'll be
mischief to pay on the floor--sure there will!"
Bob's handsome head was thrown back; his thin nostrils dilated as
though there was in them the breath of conflict. The lips were drawn
across the white teeth with just part enough to show their edges, and in
the depths of the eyes was a dark-red blaze that somehow gave the
impression one gets in looking down some long avenue of black at the
instant a locomotive headlight rounds a curve at night.
Twice before, way back in our college days, I had had a peep at this
gambling tempter of Bob's. Once in a poker game in our rooms, when a
crowd of New York classmates tried to run him out of a hand by the
sheer weight of coin. And again at the Pequot House at New London on
the eve of a varsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of
money and taunts at Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded
feet and frightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob's cents, at
the sum total of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of
Yale money and came to with a white face streaming with cold
perspiration. These events had passed out of my memory as the
ordinary student breaks that any hot-blooded youth is liable to make in
like circumstances. As I looked at Bob that day, while he tried to tell
me that the business of Randolph & Randolph would not be safe in his
keeping, I had to admit to myself that I was puzzled. I had regarded my
old college chum not only as the best mentally harnessed man I had
ever met, but I knew him as the soul of honour, that honour of the old
story-books, and I could not credit his being tempted to jeopardise
unfairly the rights or property of another. But it was habit with me to
let Bob have his way, and I did not press him to come into our firm as a
full partner.
Five years later, during which time affairs, business and social, had
been slipping along as well as either Bob or I could have asked, I was

preparing for another sit-down to show my chum that the time had now
come for him to help me in earnest, when a queer thing happened--one
of those unaccountable incidents that God sometimes sees fit to drop
across the life-paths of His children, paths heretofore as straight and
far-ahead-visible as highways along which one has never to look twice
to see where he is travelling; one of those events