Despite his generous allowance, he was always in debt, and his father, although his eyes had been opened by the story of the exploit with the freight car, had no suspicion of the way his boy had been squandering his money. Now that there had been a partial exposure, Foote lived in constant fear that his creditors, by appealing to his father for payment, would reveal what he had managed thus far to keep hidden; and, having some money that his mother had sent him, he decided to try to double the sum at least, instead of using it to appease the most insistent of his creditors: his tailor and his shoemaker.
It wasn’t much of a place that Foote went to. Many people who have never seen the inside of a gambling house think that they are veritable palaces, but that is not often so. There may have been a few such places, years ago, at Saratoga, at Long Branch, and even in New York. At Monte Carlo, and a few other protected and legalized gambling places in Europe, the fittings are very luxurious. But it is not so in this country, as a rule.
In this house, in the business part of New Haven, cunningly arranged so that any one passing in the street would have been far from suspecting its nature, Foote was ushered—after passing the rigid inspection of the man at the door—into a large room, the air of which was heavy with stale smoke.
At one end were three tables arranged for roulette, with a tired, heavy-eyed man idly twirling the balls around at one of them. The season was practically over, with the ending of the college year, and soon the gamblers would flit to other parts, where new victims were to be found. In another part of the room was a buffet, with a few bottles of whisky, and some unappetizing sandwiches. Some pictures of stage favorites were on the walls, and that represented the whole effort to make the place luxurious and attractive. Only foolish boys like Foote, without the sense to penetrate the sham and pretense of the place, could be deceived by such methods.
A short, dark man, with a bulldog jaw and a pair of watery eyes, stepped forward to greet Foote when he appeared in the gambling room.
“How are you, Mr. Foote?” he said, with little attempt to be pleasant. Foote had been plucked for about all he was worth, and Marsten, the gambler, knew that very well. It was his business to make no mistakes in such matters. And, according to his lights, he was a good business man. “I hear you’ve been getting into trouble,” he continued. “Bucking up against the pride of the Y. M. C. A.—Mr. Merriwell?”
The gamblers who infested New Haven hated Dick Merriwell because they knew that his influence among Yale men was all against their trade. Dick had driven Harding, one of their number, from his profitable pastime of fleecing Yale men at poker, and they knew that, so long as he was in control of Yale athletics and the most popular man about the college, their activities would be limited. They had always managed to come out ahead in their struggles with the Yale faculty, but Dick Merriwell had proved a far more dangerous opponent.
Foote was surprised and alarmed at the knowledge of his affairs the gambler showed. He had supposed his trouble with Merriwell a closely guarded secret.
“How did you hear about that?” he flamed out. “You know too much, it seems to me!”
“There’s precious little you boys do that doesn’t reach me sooner or later,” said Marsten, with an evil grin. “If you’d come to me and got some advice, I might have been able to help you out so that you wouldn’t have got caught. Now, you see, you’re in bad yourself, and you haven’t hurt the man you went after. That’s a poor way to do. You took too many chances.”