“Do you boast that you have been cheating at cards to help me?”
Confound him! he could sting a man with that tongue of his!
“A man can play poker without cheating. Just as a man can do business without cheating!”
I looked him in the eye and he shut up. I had found out that I could get along with him better when he didn’t talk. After the meal I went back to the game. I felt that every little helped, provided I could hold my own.
I couldn’t resist a quiet chuckle inside when I reflected that I was industriously playing cards for the benefit of Judge Zebulon Kingsley, Sunday-school superintendent of Levant.
I had learned long before how to watch out in a card game, and when I felt little scratches on the backs of the cards and observed that one of the players was doing the gouge act with a specially manicured finger-nail, I turned a few tricks of my own. I felt the full humor of the thing when I calmed my conscience with the thought that it was all for the sake of the judge. When he came to the curtains and glared at me I grinned at him.
I cleaned up one hundred and fifteen dollars, at any rate, before we rolled into Spokane—and I had at least five hundred dollars’ worth of respite from my bitter misgivings. When I showed that tainted money to the judge with some little pride and impelled by a spirit of devilishness I couldn’t control, I thought for a moment that he would bite me.
“I’m not going to associate any longer with a scalawag. I’m not going to be bullyragged by a scoundrel!”
“However, when we’re roaming we’ve got to do as the roamers do,” I told him. Deep in me I was ashamed of the disrespect I was showing him by plaguing him in that fashion, but I felt an almost irresistible hankering to do it; he had so long lorded it in Levant. Furthermore, he did not seem to recognize in any manner my spirit of self-sacrifice; he had not shown to me one flash of wholehearted gratitude. I may have had a cloudy notion that he needed to have his spirit of Kingsley pride humbled before he would ever consider me as a likely son-in-law. My ideas then and the memories of my ideas now are not very clear, for I was not in any very calm and philosophic mood those days.
After a carriage had snatched us across Spokane and we were landed on the platform of a station from which trains for the Idaho country departed, he did buck in good earnest.