“I can't take it,” said I, feeling that, in my present condition, to take it would be very near to betraying the confidence of my old friend.
“They lost it in a straight game,” he hastened to assure me. “I haven't had a 'brace' box or crooked wheel for four years.” This with a sober face and a twinkle in his eye. “But even if I had helped chance to do the good work of teaching them to take care of their money, you'd not refuse me. Up town and down town, and all over the place, what's business, when you come to look at it sensibly, but trading in stolen goods? Do you know a man who could honestly earn more than ten or twenty thousand a year—good clean money by good clean work?”
“Oh, for that matter, your money's as clean as anybody's,” said I. “But, you know, I'm a speculator, Joe. I have my downs—and this happens to be a stormy time for me. If I take your money, I mayn't be able to account for it or even to pay dividends on it for—maybe a year or so.”
“It's all right, old man. I'll never give it a thought till you remind me of it. Use it as you'd use your own. I've got to put it behind somebody's luck—why not yours?”
He finished doing up the package, then he seated himself, and we both looked at it through the smoke of our cigars.
“It's just as easy to deal in big sums as in little, in large matters as in small, isn't it, Joe,” said I, “once one gets in the way of it?”
“Do you remember—away back there—the morning,” he asked musingly—“the last morning—you and I got up from the straw in the stables over at Jerome Park—the stables they let us sleep in?”
“And went out in the dawn to roost on the rails and spy on the speed trials of old Revell's horses?”
“Exactly,” said Joe, and we looked at each other and laughed. “We in rags—gosh, how chilly it was that morning! Do you remember what we talked about?”
“No,” said I, though I did.