"But the case you cite, Checkers, is one in a thousand," I said, smiling broadly in spite of myself. "While that one man may have made a success of a very questionable sort through unusual luck, or unusual shrewdness, there have numberless others gone to ruin—utter, irretrievable ruin, by giving way to their passion for gambling.
"If you object to a wholesale house, I may perhaps find something else for you to do. But it seems to me to be simply a shame that a boy of your ability and brains should be content to be nothing but a tout, and herd with the riff-raff and scum of creation. Now, once and for all, if you desire to better yourself, I shall be glad to help you; but otherwise I must simply refuse to have you about me any longer. Think it over and come in to-morrow, and tell me your decision. Now, you must excuse me as I have an engagement with this gentleman," and I turned to greet a friend whose timely arrival saved me from the "touch" which I could see Checkers was nerving himself to make.
I found however that to secure an immediate position for my protégé was a much more difficult matter than I had at first imagined. I spoke to a dozen different people. Most of them assured me that they already had more help than they had need of. Others needed no one now, but thought they might in a month or two. My uncle said that "for my sake he would try to make a place for my friend." But when I told him all the facts, he shook his head and looked very dubious.
Meanwhile at frequent intervals, Checkers would drop into my office, and chat of the happenings of other days, or tell me of his present doings. It seemed to me, as I often told him, that if he would only exercise one-half the thought and ingenuity in the pursuit of something legitimate that he used in "separating the angels he got next to from their gold," he would long since have achieved a fortune.
He delighted in telling of the successful working of some new scheme he had figured out for the trapping of the unwary. And at each recital I used to marvel at the boundless credulity of the average human.
But whenever I could I would start him off upon some incident in his former life. In the story of his boyish courtship, the trials he underwent in securing his wife, and his subsequent sorrows and misfortunes, there was an exquisite blending of humor and pathos which appealed to me immeasurably. It was seldom, however, that he would talk of those days—the sadness of it all was still too near to him. When he was in luck he never referred to them—he seemed to live in the present alone. But when, as was frequently the case, his luck deserted him and things went wrong, he would sometimes get a fit of the blues, and, falling into a reminiscent mood, would find a sort of morbid comfort in living it all over again. He would skip abruptly from scene to scene, one incident or person suggesting another, and in his own peculiar way he would describe a situation or picture a character with a vividness worthy of a Dickens. For instance, when, in speaking of his father-in-law, he said that "the family used to have to treat him with cocaine before he could stand it to give up a nickel," I thought it a very forceful way of expressing the old man's carefulness.
As the days went by and nothing came of my efforts to get a position for Checkers, I had perforce to drop the matter, and Checkers never again referred to it.
Gradually his visits became less frequent, as I ceased to continue a profitable subject; for his invention, however fertile, could not furnish new excuses forever. But I often found myself gathering up the threads of his story as he had told it, weaving into the growing fabric some strands of my own imaginings, until I seemed to find in it an odd and pathetic little romance.
The town of Clarksville, Ark., was not attractive at any time, but to Checkers, who had arrived there with Arthur Kendall at three o'clock that summer's morning en route from Hot Springs, the aspect of the place seemed particularly dismal.