“I oughtn’t to have said anything. It wasn’t any of my business, anyway,” said Elliott, throwing away the remains of his resentment, for when Henninger chose to be ingratiating he was able to exercise a singular charm.
“I’m glad that little fool didn’t hit me,” went on Henninger, slowly. “There would have been trouble. He isn’t such a fool, either. His memory is excellent.”
“You don’t mean that—really—” began Elliott, and stopped.
“Elliott, I don’t know whether you’ve been in hard luck often enough and hard enough to get a correct light on what I’m going to tell you. No man knows anything about life, or human nature, or himself, till he’s been up against it,—banged up against it, knocked down and stepped on,—and the knowledge isn’t worth having at the price.
“This was two years ago. I had just come up from Tampico, and I’d been two weeks in a Mexican jail because I wouldn’t pay blackmail to the governor’s private secretary. I had just fifty-seven dollars, I remember, when I landed in New Orleans, but I had a good thing up my sleeve, and I went straight up to St. Louis to see some men I knew there and interest them in it. Two of them came back with me to New Orleans. I was to show them the workings of the thing—it doesn’t matter now what it was—and if they liked it, they were to put up the capital.
“We came down the river by boat. There’s a good deal of card-playing on those river boats yet, though nothing to what it used to be, of course, and we all three got into a game, along with a young sport from Memphis, who had been flashing a big roll all over the boat. Now I can play poker a little, and our limit was low, but I hadn’t any luck that day. I couldn’t get anything better than two pairs, and my pile kept going down till it reached pretty near nothing. All the money I had in the world was on that table, and my future, too, for I had to keep my end up with those capitalists. I was a fool to go into the game, but I couldn’t pull out. About that time I happened to feel a long, thin, loose splinter on the under side of the table. I don’t think that I’d have done it but for that, but I took to holding out an ace or two, sticking them under that splinter. I was beginning to get my money back, when—I don’t know how it happened—the fellow at my left suspected something, leaned over and reached under the table and pulled out the aces.
“They don’t shoot for that sort of thing on the river any more, but it was nearly as bad. I got off at the next landing. All the passengers were lined up to hoot the detected card-sharper. This fellow on board here was one of them.”
The brief, staccato sentences seemed to burn the speaker’s lips. Elliott could find nothing to say, and there was a strained silence. He could not see Henninger’s face in the dusk, but presently he gently touched his shoulder.
Henninger started nervously. “Let’s walk about a bit,” he proposed in a more natural voice. “It’s too pleasant to go below.”
They made the circumference of the decks two or three times at a vigorous pace, and without a word spoken.