Old Bill, platonically interested, discovered that his cigar was sparkless, applied a match, and casually set forth his opinion. “Well, I guess that was about as poor a way of spendin’ eighty dollars as I ever saw, but it all goes to show there’s truth in the old motto that anything at all can happen in any poker game! That was a mighty nice hundred-dollar bill you had on you, Collie; but it’s like what Smithie said: a piece o’ money goes hoppin’ around from one person to another—it don’t care!—and yours has gone and hopped to Charlie. The question is, Who’s it goin’ to hop to next?” He paused to laugh, glanced over the cards that had been dealt him, and concluded: “My guess is ’t some good-lookin’ woman’ll prob’ly get a pretty fair chunk o’ that hundred-dollar bill out o’ Charlie. Well, let’s settle down to the ole army game.”
They settled down to it, and by twelve o’clock (the invariable closing hour of these pastimes in the old shack) Collinson had lost four dollars and thirty cents more. He was commiserated by his fellow gamesters as they put on their coats and overcoats, preparing to leave the hot little room. They shook their heads, laughed ruefully in sympathy, and told him he oughtn’t to carry hundred-dollar bills upon his person when he went out among friends. Old Bill made what is sometimes called an unfortunate remark.
“Don’t worry about Collie,” he said jocosely. “That hundred-dollar bill prob’ly belonged to some rich client of his.”
“What!” Collinson said, staring.
“Never mind, Collie; I wasn’t in earnest,” the joker explained. “Of course I didn’t mean it.”
“Well, you oughtn’t to say it,” Collinson protested. “People say a thing like that about a man in a joking way, but other people hear it sometimes and don’t know he’s joking, and a story gets started.”
“My goodness, but you’re serious!” Old Bill exclaimed. “You look like you had a misery in your chest, as the rubes say; and I don’t blame you! Get on out in the fresh night air and you’ll feel better.”
He was mistaken, however; the night air failed to improve Collinson’s spirits as he walked home alone through the dark and chilly streets. There was indeed a misery in his chest, where stirred a sensation vaguely nauseating; his hands were tremulous and his knees infirm as he walked. In his mind was a confusion of pictures and sounds, echoes from Charlie Loomis’s shack: he could not clear his mind’s eye of the one-hundred-dollar bill; and its likeness, as it lay crumpled on the green cloth under the drop-light, haunted and hurt him as a face in a coffin haunts and hurts the new mourner. Bits of Smithie’s discursiveness resounded in his mind’s ear, keeping him from thinking. “In one person’s hands money’ll do good likely, and in another’s it’ll do harm.”—“The dummy that said, ‘Money’s the root of all evil!’ ”
It seemed to Collinson then that money was the root of all evil and the root of all good, the root and branch of all life, indeed. With money, his wife would have been amiable, not needing gay bachelors to take her to vaudevilles. Her need of money was the true foundation of the jealousy that had sent him out morose and reckless to-night; of the jealousy that had made it seem, when he gambled with Charlie Loomis for the luck dollar, as though they really gambled for luck with her.
It still seemed to him that they had gambled for luck with her: Charlie had wanted the talisman, as Smithie said, in order to believe in his luck—his luck with women—and therefore actually be lucky with them; and Charlie had won. But as Collinson plodded homeward in the chilly midnight, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping, he began to wonder how he could have risked money that belonged to another man. What on earth had made him do what he had done? Was it the mood his wife had set him in as he went out that evening? No; he had gone out feeling like that often enough, and nothing had happened.