"Isn't that too much?" I ask.
He made no reply. We played the game. Once more it was mine. "Four hundred and eighty against four hundred and eighty?"
I says, "Well, sir, I don't want to wrong you. Let us make it a hundred rubles that you owe me, and call it square."
You ought to have heard how he yelled at this, and yet he was not a proud man at all. "Either play, or don't play!" says he.
Well, I see there's nothing to be done. "Three hundred and eighty, then, if you please," says I.
I really wanted to lose. I allowed him forty points in advance. He stood fifty-two to my thirty-six. He began to cut the yellow one, and missed eighteen points; and I was standing just at the turning-point. I made a stroke so as to knock the ball off of the billiard-table. No—so luck would have it. Do what I might, he even missed the doublet. I had won again.
"Listen," says he. "Peter,"—he did not call me Petrushka then,—"I can't pay you the whole right away. In a couple of months I could pay three thousand even, if it were necessary."
And there he stood just as red, and his voice kind of trembled.
"Very good, sir," says I.
With this he laid down the cue. Then he began to walk up and down, up and down, the perspiration running down his face.