"Oh, so you have broken out, have you? I thought you were too deep in the study of French literature to pay any attention to such trifles. And you have got on a reddish necktie. You'll be an anarchist the first thing you know."
"He is going away, William," said Mrs. Elbridge, and the Judge did not look up. The sadness of her voice stirred William to repentance. "Going away? I don't see how we can get along without him. He and I joke, but we understand each other, don't we, Howard?"
"Perfectly, Uncle William; and when I open my ranch out West, you may look on it as your home."
"Thank you, my boy; but I don't care to go out there again. I was once a power there, but the country is now overrun with a lesser breed, and I am afraid that I might not get along with them. I want men, such as there used to be. Man will soon be a thing of the past. The scorcher is running over him—and I want to say right here, that if one of those fellows ever runs over me, he'll get a bullet just about the size of a—a—about the size of that." He held up his thumb and measured off the missile intended for the scorcher. "You hear what I say. Why, confound 'em, if they see a man, a real man, they bow their necks and make at him, but if one of them ever runs into me, the coroner will have a job."
Howard and Bodney went down town together and opened the office, as usual, for clients who did not come, and who, if they had come, would have shaken their heads and gone away.
"Howard," said Bodney, "I told you that I was financially ruined."
"Yes, I remember, but afterward you said that everything was all right, that your fit had passed. Has it come again?"
"It didn't go away. A sort of drunkenness made it appear so. The fact is, I am in need of ten dollars, to pay a man I owe. He keeps harassing me."
"I need every cent I've got, old man, but here's ten."
Bodney took the bank note and went out. The poker microbe was not so easily to be exterminated. It had suggested to Bodney that the only way to replace the money taken from the Judge's safe was to play poker. And, why not play? He might win—he had won once, and what the cards had done they would do again. He remembered the courtesies that had been shown him at the club, the congratulation of the man at the desk when he won and the sympathy when he lost. "Couldn't make 'em stick, eh? When a man gets the hands beaten you do, he's got to lose his money. There's nothing to it. But you'll get 'em yet—you play as good game as any of them." A man of sense could see that it was a losing game from the start, no matter how honestly conducted. And Bodney, going to the club before business put on its cheerful countenance, had seen them counting the swallowings of the ever hungry box, the rake-off, the unsatisfied maw. A fairly active game would average for the house at least eight dollars an hour, so that in the end every man must be a loser. He knew all this as the others knew it, but the microbe squirmed and made him itch.