“What am I to do?” he said. “I am in the hands of my friends.”
They all looked at the Colonel. He was the oldest in the party.
“I am no man’s censor,” said he, seeing that he was expected to speak. “Neither do I care to consider the morals of the question, but I have seen a man blow his brains out over a card table after he had done what you have done, and lost, as you, fortunately, did not. I said then that he did well, and I say now that you have done well. Having won with money that was not your own, even though you did it inadvertently, you could not touch your winnings. But as to that which you won with your own money--Are you very sure that you will never play again?”
“Then pocket your money. We have played together, we five, for more than a year now, and I doubt if you are much ahead of the game, even counting your winnings to-night.”
He extended his hand, and the Lawyer grasped it nervously. One after another, the three others shook hands with him also, and the game was over.
“No, I don’t play poker any more,” said a big Westerner, who came into an up-town club-house the other night with some friends who had been showing him the town. He spoke rather seriously, although he had been chatting and laughing in a loud, breezy way until the very moment when somebody suggested a little game of draw as an appropriate wind-up of the night’s diversion.
“Why, how is that?” exclaimed one of his friends. “You used to play a stiff game. You haven’t sworn off, have you?”
“N-no,” said the Westerner, still serious. “I have not sworn off, but there is no excitement in the game for me now. The last game I played was too exciting.
“It was a dozen years ago, when I was a tenderfoot, with the usual allowance of freshness and ignorance of frontier perils. We used to call it brashness, and I was certainly brash. I roamed around the country for the better part of a year, with a more or less vague purpose of settling somewhere, but not caring much where. I had money enough to start with, whenever I should find an opening to suit me, but I was not in a hurry, and was enjoying the freedom and adventurous life of the plains as only a youngster can who is not obliged to put up with the hardships, but looks on them as mere incidents.