“Nope,” he said, then paused and grinned. “I reckon I’ve got the best of it as it is—got their fifteen hundred, so I’ll just hang on to it and leave ’em alone, and stick around with you two fellers. I was mighty lonesome yisttiday without you two and— By heck! I’m glad you ain’t seasick any more. Reminds me of a story about a feller that—”
And the partners glanced at each other, as if admitting a great mistake; for the garrulous one was on again, had promised to stay with them indefinitely, closely, intimately, and—talk their heads off! He clung to them like a loving leach, or as a bride of seventy adheres to a bridegroom of twenty, or as does the unbreakable limpet to its gray rock. His sole virtue was that he never repeated himself. Their sole hope was that some time he would run down, get hoarse, or have paralysis of the tongue. He tried indirectly to learn all about them, where they had been, their business, whither bound, and what luck they had endured or profited by; but the partners, bored, surfeited with words, and casting about for means of escape, maintained their customary reticence.
David was the first to escape and most callously deserted his partner; but Goliath, being less diplomatic, eventually invented an excuse and ran, rather than walked, to a distant part of the ship. The partners met in their cabin and took turns in imprecating the kindliness that had inspired their well-meant interference.
“I don’t give a cuss what happens to him now. He’s been warned, and if he loses his wad it’s not our fault,” David asserted.
“Neither do I care what happens to him,” Goliath growled. “I ain’t no hero, nor Christian martyr, nor nothin’ like that. All I want is to have him keep away from me. I’m goin’ to read from now on, right here in this cabin. I’m afraid to go out on the deck.”
“So’m I!” David asserted; but their resolution broke, after some hours, and the craving for open space, habitual with such men of outdoors, overcame their fears of Cochran, and they slipped away to the decks again. Almost surreptitiously they looked through a window of the smoke room and then frowned. Cochran was sitting at the same table with the same pair of gamblers, playing with what was probably the same deck of cards and talking Just as steadily as ever before. Even as the partners looked they caught signs of undoubted signals between the two card sharps, saw a bet brought to a finale, and by the interchange of money discerned that Lucky Cochran’s luck seemed to be out, and that he was passing over considerable sums of his accidental wealth. Save for these three earnest players, the smoke room was deserted.
“Think we ought to go in and bust up that combination?” Goliath asked.
“Humph! That old boob would think we were hornin’ into his business. The pair of cutthroats he’s playin’ with would yell to the skipper of the ship for help, and—no!—all we can do is to get him outside and tell him he’s bein’ trimmed by good sign work.”
David sauntered in through the door and said, with an attempt at suavity: “Cochran, I’d like to talk to you a minute outside. It’s somethin’ right urgent. Sorry to disturb your game, but—”
“Sure, pardner, sure!” said Cochran, lumbering to his feet and sweeping his money into his pockets. “See you fellers later,” he said to the two gamblers who glared at David, exchanged glances of inquiry, and then resignedly began pocketing their own money. But David and Goliath gained nothing by their warning. Cochran merely grinned and then chuckled, and finally laughed.