Had Ebner Ford found him to-night, he would have discovered him winning heavily in one of the best-known gambling-houses in town. Here, also, he was known as “Jack,” and any check he signed for was accepted. The old negro at the door, sliding back the small grated panel, knew him instantly on the dark, high stoop, opened the door immediately, bowed low in his brass-buttoned livery, and called him “Mr. L.”
Up-stairs, in the shadow of the shades casting their bright light over the long, green roulette table, others knew him as “Jack” Lamont. The faro dealer, with his precise, pale hands, knew him, too, but contented himself with a friendly nod of greeting—omitting his name.
The proprietor was an honest man—a man who never did an unkind act or said an unkind thing to man, woman, or child in his life. This man had rare virtues—he never drank, he never smoked, he never swore; he loved his wife and children; he stood at the elbows of the riffraff of weak humanity in his house, and yet, apart from them all. He possessed the manners of a prince and the heart of a gentleman, for he did kind things nightly. The college youth who lost, and whom he knew could not at all afford it, he would approach in a way that even the youth, heated with drink and gaming, could not take offense at. Little by little, as the boy lost, he would persuade him to stop. He would explain to him “that he had struck a run of bad luck; that the same thing had happened to him a score of times in his life—suppose you let me take your last hand?”
This over a game of poker in the small room up-stairs on the third floor. Then somehow he managed to lose to the boy, lose all he had won from him, gave him a free supper of jellied quail and champagne, and saw that he reached his college train in time, with what he had entered his gambling-house with safe in his pocket.
“You have one of those peculiar streaks of bad luck on,” he’d repeat. “Leave the game alone for six months, son; I never knew luck to change in less.”
There was something lovable in his character, in his gentle, well-modulated voice, in the gleam of his honest blue eyes, brilliant in a face exceedingly pale, crowned by fair hair silvered at the temples. Tall and slim he was, a straight and graceful man, with a clean-cut profile, a blond mustache, and clothes that were positively immaculate: The white silk ascot tie, with its single pearl, the long gray Prince Albert coat and trousers, the trim patent-leather shoes. And his hands! What wonderful hands he had—pale, ringless hands, yet denoting strength and character. And his spotless white cuffs, and the plain gold links his wife had given him. This tall, pale man, who rang true as gold, he, too, was a born gambler, but he played like a gentleman, and could go to bed at daylight owing no man a grudge, and with the sincere belief that that which he had won he had won honestly.
Lamont played on—played on as he had luckily the night before, and the night before that. Flushed with his luck, when he finished this morning at five, he had over six thousand dollars of the house’s money. The old negro saw him out with a smile, and he handed him a five-dollar bill for his trouble.
He still had sense enough left not to go back to his old haunts. The only wise thing to do he did—went to a respectable hotel, locked his door, and slept until his bank opened for depositors. With his great good luck, his old, sordid haunts had lost their glamour, somehow. His thoughts turned to sweeter things.
He longed to see Sue. He was very much in the same condition of mind as many a man has been before—and who, having bathed, shaved, and dressed, goes out and buys a clean, fresh rosebud for his buttonhole.