Bill grunted and spat. “She ain’t. Not if you mean that car them folks wished onto you. The tail light’s pretty fair, though. And in their hurry the lady went off and left a pink silk stockin’ in the back seat. The toe’s wore out of it, though. Casey, if you wait till you overhaul ’em with that thing they wheeled in here under the name of a car—”
“Oh, that’s all right, Bill,” Casey grunted gamely. “I was goin’ to git me a new car, anyway. Mine wasn’t so much. They’re welcome.”
Bill grunted and spat again, but he did not say anything.
“I’ll go see Dwyer, and see how much I got left,” Casey said presently, and his voice, whether you believe it or not, was cheerful.
After a while Casey returned. He was grinning, but the grin was, to a careful observer, a bit sickish. “Say, Bill, talk about poker—I’m off it fer life. Now look what it done to me, Bill! I puts twenty-five thousand dollars into the bank—minus two hundred I took in money—and I takes a check book and I goes over to The Club and gits into a game. I wears the check book down to the stubs. I goes back and asks Dwyer how much I got in the bank, and he looks me over like I was a sick horse he had doubts about bein’ worth doctorin’, and as if he thought he mebby might better take me out an’ shoot me an’ put me outa my misery. ‘Jest one dollar an’ sixty-seven cents, Casey,’ he says to me. ‘If the checks is all in, which I trust they air!’”
Casey got out his plug of chewin’ tobacco and pried off a blunted corner. “An’ hell, Bill! I had that much in the bank when I started,” he finished plaintively.
“Hell!” said Bill in brief, eloquent sympathy.
Casey set his teeth together and extracted comfort from the tobacco. He expectorated ruminatively.
“Well, anyway, I got me some bran’-new socks, an’ they’re paid for, thank God!” He tilted his old Stetson down over his right eye at his favorite, Caseyish angle, stuck his hands in his pocket, and strolled out into the sunshine.