Jay Bird had need to keep both his eyes wide open, for present players and prospective players were ringed four deep about the table. The smoke of their cigars and their cigarettes went upward to add stratified richness to the thick blue clouds that crawled in layers against the ceiling, and the sweat of their brows ran down their faces to drip in drops upon the table as one after another they claimed the dotted cubes and shook, rattled and rolled 'em, and snapped their finger in importunity, calling upon Big Dick or Phoebe Dice to come and to come right away. And then this one would fail to make his point and would lose his turn, and the overworked ivories would go into the snatching eager hand of that one who stood next him, and all the rest, waiting for their chance, would breathe hard, grunting in fancied imitation of negroes, and shouting out in a semi-hysterical fashion as the player passed or didn't pass.
A young freight conductor laid down a ten-dollar bill and the King covered it with another. The freight conductor ran that ten up to one hundred and eighty dollars, ten or twenty at a dip, then shot the whole amount and lost it; then lost ninety more on top of that, and with a white face and a quite empty pay envelope, still held fast in a shaking left hand, fell back out of the hunched-in, scrouging circle. But he didn't go away; he stayed to watch the others, envious of those who temporarily beat the game, dismally sympathetic, with an unspoken fellow feeling, for those who, like him, went broke. Josh Herron, the roundhouse foreman, dropped half his month's wages before he decided that, since luck plainly was not with him, he had had about enough. A clerk from the timekeeper's office shoved in, taking his place.
When he wasn't answering knocks at the door Babe Givens circulated about the outskirts of the tightened group like a small, black rabbit dog about a brush pile harbouring hares, his eyes all china and his mouth all ivory. The sound of those small squared bones dashing together in their worn leather cup was music to his Afric ears. The white man in the first place stole this game from Babe's race, you know.
Babe had to answer knocks a good many times. Newcomers kept on climbing the stair and knuckling the door.
“Game's mighty full, genelmens—but they's always room fur one mo'. Step right in and wait yo' turn,” Babe would say, ushering in the latest arrival. Babe was almost as happy as if he had been shooting himself.
As I say, they kept coming. At length, a few minutes before midnight, when the pile of silver under the King's hands had grown from a molehill to a mountain and the wadded paper money made a small shock of yellow-and-green fodder upon the green pasture of the table-top, came still another, and this one most strangely burdened. Very mousily indeed this eleventh-hour visitor ascended the steps, and first trying the doorknob, knocked with a fumbling knock against the pine panels.
Babe drew back the bolt and peered out into the darkness at the solitary figure dimly seen. “Game's mighty full, genelmen,” he began the formula of greeting, “but you kin——”
Babe began it but he never finished it. Some-. thing long and black, something slim and fearsome—yes, most fearsome—slid through the opening, and grazed his nose so that the little darky, stricken limp, fell back.
“Please, suh, boss,” he begged, “fur Gawd's sake don't shoot—don't shoot!”
Babe started his prayer in a babble but he ended it with a shriek—a shriek so imploringly loud that all there, however intent they might be, were bound to hear and take notice. Over the heads of his patrons Highpockets looked, and he stiffened where he stood. They all looked; they all stiffened.