“I'll give you double if you'll get up and quit the board!”
“Why?” asked Jeff haughtily.
“Why?” repeated the man fiercely; “why? Well, your father shot himself thar, where you're sittin', at this table;” and he added, with a half-forced, half-hysterical laugh, “HE'S PLAYIN' AT ME OVER YOUR SHOULDERS!”
Jeff lifted a face as colorless as the gambler's own, went back to his seat, and placed his entire gains on a single card. The gambler looked at him nervously, but dealt. There was a pause, a slight movement where Jeff stood, and then a simultaneous cry from the players as they turned towards him. But his seat was vacant. “Run after him! Call him back! HE'S WON AGAIN!” But he had vanished utterly.
HOW he left, or what indeed followed, he never clearly remembered. His movements must have been automatic, for when, two hours later, he found himself at the “Pioneer” coach office, with his carpet-bag and blankets by his side, he could not recall how or why he had come! He had a dumb impression that he had barely escaped some dire calamity,—rather that he had only temporarily averted it,—and that he was still in the shadow of some impending catastrophe of destiny. He must go somewhere, he must do something to be saved! He had no money, he had no friends; even Yuba Bill had been transferred to another route, miles away. Yet, in the midst of this stupefaction, it was a part of his strange mental condition that trivial details of Miss Mayfield's face and figure, and even apparel, were constantly before him, to the exclusion of consecutive thought. A collar she used to wear, a ribbon she had once tied around her waist, a blue vein in her dropped eyelid, a curve in her soft, full, bird-like throat, the arch of her in-step in her small boots—all these were plainer to him than the future, or even the present. But a voice in his ear, a figure before his abstracted eyes, at last broke upon his reverie.
“Jeff Briggs!”
Jeff mechanically took the outstretched hand of a young clerk of the Pioneer Coach Company, who had once accompanied Yuba Bill and stopped at the “Half-way House.” He endeavored to collect his thoughts; here seemed to be an opportunity to go somewhere!
“What are you doing now?” said the young man briskly.
“Nothing,” said Jeff simply.
“Oh, I see—going home!”