"No you don't! You play because its got into your blood, and you can't help playing. And you'll keep on playing till you're busted and it'll be a good thing when you are! Your luck has changed now, and they'll get you."
"I'm still playing on their money," retorted Brent a little nettled at the girl's attack. "If they clean me out, all right. They'll only win the half million I took out of my two claims—the rest of it I took away from them. Anyway, whose business is it?" he asked sullenly.
"It ain't nobody's business, but yours. I—I wish to God it was mine. Everybody knows the hooch is getting you—and that is just what they all say—it's a shame—but it's his own business. I'm the only one that could say anything to you, and I'm—I'm sorry I did."
"They're right—it's my business, and no one
else's. If they think I'm so damned far gone let them come and get my pile—I'll still have the claims, and I'll go out and bring in another stake and go after them harder than ever!"
"No you won't—they'll get the claims, too. And you won't have the nerve, nor the muscles to go out and make another strike. When you once bust, you'll be a bum—a has-been—right."
"I suppose," sneered Brent, thoroughly angry now: "that I should marry you and hit out for the claim so we could keep what's left in the family—and you'd be the family."
The girl laughed, a trifle hysterically: "No—I wouldn't marry you on a bet—now. I was foolish enough to think of it, once—but not now. I've done some thinking since that night you tossed that sack of dust on the board. If you married me and did go back to where you were—if you quit the cards and the hooch and got down to be what you ought to be—where would I stand? Who am I, and what am I? You would stick by your bargain—but you wouldn't want me. You could never go back outside—with me. And if you wouldn't quit the cards and the hooch, I wouldn't have you—not like you are now—flabby, and muddy-eyed, an' your breath so heavy with rot-gut you could light it with a match. No, that dream's busted and inside of a week you'll be busted, too." Setting down her glass the girl quitted the table abruptly, leaving Brent to finish the bottle of champagne alone, after
which he sauntered down to Cuter Malone's "Klondike Palace" and made a night of it, drinking and dancing.
The week that followed was a week of almost unbroken losses for Brent. In vain, he plunged, betting his cards more wildly, and more recklessly than ever before, in an effort to force his luck. But it only hastened the end, which came about midnight upon the Thursday following Thanksgiving Day, at the moment he looked into the eyes of Camillo Bill Waters and called a bet of fifty-thousand: "That's good," he announced, as Bill showed Aces-up. "And that just finishes me—I held the claims at a million—and that's the last of it."