"'Look here, Podstreak,' I said, 'I'm next to you.' I really wasn't, but the bluff worked. He grew white.
"'For Heaven's sake, don't give me away,' he cried; 'the boys'll lynch me.'
"'All right,' I said; 'if you'll promise to quit.'
"Then he made a full confession, and showed me how he did it. He had an elastic rubber bag under his shirt, and a tube going up his arm and down his sleeve, ending in a white nozzle inside his cuff. When he went to empty his glass of whisky he simply pressed some air out of the rubber bag, put the nozzle in the glass, and let it suck up all the whisky. At night he used to empty all the liquor out of the bag and sell it to a saloon-keeper. Oh, he was a phoney piece of work.
"'I've been a total abstainer (in private) for seven years,' he told me. 'Yes,' I said, 'and you'll become one in public for another seven.' And he did."
Several men had dropped in to swell this Bohemian circle. Some had brought bottles. There was a painter who had been "hung," a Mus Bac., an ex-champion amateur pugilist, a silver-tongued orator, a man who had "suped" for Mansfield, and half a dozen others. The little cabin was crowded, the air hazy with smoke, the conversation animated. But mostly it was a monologue by the inimitable Yorick.
Suddenly the conversation turned to the immorality of the town.
"Now, I have a theory," said the Pote, "that the regeneration of Dawson is at hand. You know Good is the daughter of Evil, Virtue the offspring of Vice. You know how virtuous a man feels after a jag. You've got to sin to feel really good. Consequently, Sin must be good to be the means of good, to be the raw material of good, to be virtue in the making, mustn't it? The dance-halls are a good foil to the gospel-halls. If we were all virtuous, there would be no virtue in virtue, and if we were all bad no one would be bad. And because there's so much bad in this old burg of ours, it makes the good seem unnaturally good."
The Pote had the floor.
"A friend of mine had a beautiful pond of water-lilies. They painted the water exultantly and were a triumphant challenge to the soul. Folks came from far and near to see them. Then, one winter, my friend thought he would clean out his pond, so he had all the nasty, slimy mud scraped away till you could see the silver gravel glimmering on the bottom. But the lilies, with all their haunting loveliness, never came back."