The last we saw of Ebner Ford was when he glanced at the extra announcing the scandal. He who rarely bought a paper, bought this. He handed the newsboy a nickel, waited impatiently for his change, and leaped up the Elevated stairs, reading the account.
He read as he ran, glancing at Lamont’s portrait framed in an oval of yacht pennants and polo-mallets, with a horseshoe for luck crowning them all. He threw another nickel on the worn sill of the ticket window, received a coupon from a haggard ticket-seller, and kept on reading while he waited on the drafty station at Fulton Street for an up-town train. Nothing could have happened to better further his idea. Was not his friend Lamont in trouble? What better excuse to call on him and express his sympathy? He began as he boarded the train to frame up what he would say to him. “Sympathy first and business afterward,” he said to himself. How he would come to him gallantly as a friend—slap him on the back and cheer him up. “Help him ferget—all them little worries”—and having gotten him sufficiently cheered, talk to him man to man over his little scheme. He told himself that there was not a chance in a thousand of its failing; that Lamont could not very well refuse him. “Takin’ all things considered,” he mused, as he hung to a strap—“dead stuck on girlie, that’s certain—one of them little bargains that a feller like him will snap at.”
He began to wish that it was he instead of Lamont who had gotten into so much free print. “Wouldn’t have cost me a cent,” he reasoned, “and given me more solid advertisement than I could have bought fer a thousand dollars. Ain’t nothin’ like publicity to bring a feller into the public eye.”
All New York was reading the account. Thousands of others would read it all over the country, he declared. He decided he had better go to Lamont’s club first, in the hope of finding him, and failing in this, to his house. Then he thought he had “better go home first and see Emma, and brush up a little,” and with this in view left the train at 9th Street and walked rapidly across town to Waverly Place.
In the meantime Enoch had left his office; he, too, had bought a paper, which he read grimly, with mingled anger and disgust. Later came Lamont’s side of the affair in the afternoon edition. This Enoch read, taking it for precisely what it was worth, his anger rising as he thought of Sue and of her acquaintance with a scoundrel. After all said and done, the incident that had happened before the theatre was of slight interest to the public; thousands of them kindled their kitchen fires with the whole of it the next day, and having cooked breakfast over the cheerful flames, forgot that the unfortunate incident had ever happened.
A few women of Lamont’s acquaintance still gossiped over it to their intimate friends at tea and along Fifth Avenue—and forgave him. The butler at Lamont’s residence opened the door wide as usual, grave as the statue of an illustrious citizen, and as for Mrs. Lamont, she resumed her philosophic life as well.
“Handsome Jack” was drinking heavily somewhere—no one knew where; all they knew was that he had not returned; whom he hobnobbed with he had only a vague idea of himself. The mornings were the worst, the afternoons grew better, and he really only began to live steadily at midnight and beyond into those stale hours of the morning, until the chill of gray daylight sent the best banjo player’s best banjo into its worn leather case, closed the little Sunday-school melodeon, locked it, and sent its tired player to bed for the day, sent the scrub-woman to her knees, and gave the bouncer a well-earned rest with the rising sun. Possibly the only woman who knew where Lamont was was “Diamond” May, a large blonde, whose language was as refined as she could make it for the occasion, and whose quick, gray eyes were those of a retired thief’s.
She called him “Jack”—but mostly “deary,” “listen” and “deary” occurring as frequently in her vocabulary as “and” or “the.” Jack swore by her after midnight. She was proud of him, being a gentleman. She was proud, too, of being in the presence of his money and his crest ring, which to her vouched for both their respectabilities.
Luck comes to a man without the slightest warning. Strangely enough, it is the result after repeated failure. Luck arrives when least expected. It is as elusive as quicksilver and full of surprises. Neither the toiler nor the gambler can by long study control it; as for the latter, all his pet systems of play break down, unless luck is with him. He spends all his life trying to beat the game, and in the long run the game invariably beats him. And as luck can never be a steady companion, few gamblers die rich. The game itself impoverishes both the proprietor and his clients. There are some who acquire the habit of gambling; others are born gamblers, and Jack Lamont was one of these.