"I'll tell you," said Schrofft, gathering head for a flood of speech, "you stay with me. I—I called you a bum once. I take it back. You're all right. The quickness to decide, the way to make everything do what you want, the good luck, you have it all!"
"If I did have luck," Mr. Roe muttered thoughtfully, "that'd be enough to clean out Rafferty's bank. By Jove, I'll do it. I'll play the twelve."
"You come with me," Schrofft urged. "You are young, you have had your fling; now it's time to settle down. I'll help you, I'll be—what-you-call?—the balance w'eel. I teach you all I know, and in two three year you'll be the boss of us all. You'll have a chob better'n mine."
He hesitated, for Mr. Roe was gazing at him with a whimsical smile. "Go ahead, Schrofft," he said. "What kind of a job is yours? What do you get out of it?"
"Ten thousand mark a year, und expenses," said Schrofft, uneasy for some mockery to come.
"Ten thousand marks! That's twenty-five hundred dollars," Mr. Roe commented. "And expenses. That's a lot of money, Schrofft. But I live simply; my expenses wouldn't be high enough to make it pay. So I'll just go back to Batangas and play the twelve. Twelve trees, you know."
Desperately, imploringly, Schrofft argued with him, dangled larger and juicier bait before his eyes. "You might be a partner in the House!" he cried. But Mr. Roe remained unmoved, even at that dazzling prospect, and at last Schrofft lost his temper.
"You are a bum," he shouted angrily. "It's chust what I say before. You haf no home, no food, no chob, no money, and—" he finished helplessly, "Mein Gott! You do not care!"
"Money could not buy the glorious uncertainty I enjoy," Mr. Roe replied pleasantly. "Calm down, Schrofft. I'm going out to tell 'em to get a canoe ready for me."
Late that afternoon he left, with his tattered clothing and his shining boots and his little bag of gold, and his smile, which he shed benignantly on the worshippers who thronged the beach. Only three residents of all Bagalayag were missing. Down the street Lame Duck and Gouty Hen stolidly made up lost time—Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh! And up in the sala of the Tin-Roofed House a shaggy little man, his back resolutely turned to the window and the leave-taking, puffed savagely at a big china pipe, and exploded every now and then: "Chust a bum! A good-for-nothin' bum!" But when the sun was gone and all the shadows on the mountain had thickened into one, he laid down the pipe and went to the window and gazed out long over the darkening sea. "My poor little bum god from the machine," he said wistfully. "Now I must forget him."