I looked at Ben. He growled and turned away. I followed him up the ladder and out on deck. When I caught up with him, I asked, “Where you going now?”
“To borrow ten bucks from a guy I know,” he replied. “You wait here for me.”
So I waited and while I hung around the door to the carpentry shop I heard the voice of a chaplain preaching to a crowd on the deck right over our compartment. It struck me as awfully funny: a preacher upstairs giving a sermon and a gang downstairs gambling!
Pretty soon Ben came back, with a grin on his ugly face. “Come on!” he called. “We’ll trim dese guys yet.”
When I got back in my old place in the circle, I noticed that the voice of that chaplain upstairs was audible even down here, and I mentioned the fact to the man next to me.
“That’s Doc Lumber,” he informed me. “He has about as much business in the army as I have in a lady’s seminary.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“Oh—nothing. He’s all right, you know. Good preacher, but old-fashioned and too damned serious and literal-minded for an army chaplain. Nobody pays any attention to his preaching, anyway.”
So I turned my attention to the game. Ben had made a bet against the dice and lost a dollar. On the next man’s roll, he won a dollar. The dice came to me.
“We shoot one buck,” announced Ben, throwing out the dollar.