Philip drew a handful of yellow coins from his pocket.
“This is the bargain, Jack. I’ll lend you the six twenties if you will promise me to quit this business for good and all. How about it? Is it a go?”
The boy’s gratitude was almost dog-like in its frantic extravagance.
“Will I promise? My God, if you only knew how I’ve suffered! I didn’t sleep a wink last night. And I’ll never forget this, the longest day I live, Mr. Trask! I didn’t mean to be a thief, but—”
Philip saw Sheeny Mike, one of the game room spotter hawks, watching them narrowly.
“Chase your feet out of this, Jack, and remember your promise,” he said; but the hawk had seen the passing of the gold pieces and he started in pursuit of the boy. Philip detained him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Not this time, Mike; the kid is a friend of mine.”
“To hell with you! That don’t get the house anything!”
“Maybe not; just the same, it goes as it lies. You ought to know me by this time. Keep your hands where I can see them—it’s safer, because I can always beat you to the draw. Now listen: if you had the brain of a louse, Sheeny—which you haven’t—you’d know that I am worth more to the house in a month than a little one-horse railroad clerk would be in a year.” And to show his good will, he turned to the nearest roulette wheel and took his place in the circle of players.
It was something like an hour later, and after he had consistently and painstakingly lost considerably more than the sum he had given young Middleton, that he drifted aimlessly out of the game room and across the stair-head landing into the open space serving as the back gallery of the varieties theater. A dancing girl in chalk-white tights had just finished her turn, and men in the crowded lower part of the theater were pitching silver dollars onto the stage in lieu of bouquets, stamping their applause with booted feet. Philip, looking down upon the scene in a saddened reverie from the gallery height, saw the beginning of a drunken fight in the pit. Two shirt-sleeved men from the third row of seats in the orchestra struggled up, went into a fierce clinch and stumbled into the aisle in a pummelling wrestle. Before any of the aproned bar-servers could drop their trays and intervene, the wrestlers fell apart and there was the sharp report of a pistol to dominate the clamor of stamping feet—the crack of a pistol and a woman’s scream.