little secret I have never let even you into. The truth is I am not safe
yet--not safe to speak for the old house of Randolph & Randolph. Yes, you
may laugh--you who are, and always have been, as staunch and steady as the
old bronze John Harvard in the yard, you who know Monday mornings just
what you are going to do Saturday nights and all the days and nights in
between, and who always do it. Jim, I have found since I have been over on
the floor that the Southern gambling blood that made my grandfather, on
one of his trips back from New York, though he had more land and slaves
than he could use, stake his land and slaves--yes, and grandmother's
too--on a card-game, and--lose, and change the whole face of the Brownley
destiny--those same gambling microbes are in my blood, and when they begin
to claw and gnaw I want to do something; and, Jim"--and the big brown eyes
suddenly shot sparks--"if those microbes ever get unleashed, there'll be
mischief to pay on the floor--sure there will!"

Bob's handsome head was thrown back; his thin nostrils dilated as though
there was in them the breath of conflict. The lips were drawn across the
white teeth with just part enough to show their edges, and in the depths
of the eyes was a dark-red blaze that somehow gave the impression one gets
in looking down some long avenue of black at the instant a locomotive
headlight rounds a curve at night.

Twice before, way back in our college days, I had had a peep at this
gambling tempter of Bob's. Once in a poker game in our rooms, when a crowd
of New York classmates tried to run him out of a hand by the sheer weight
of coin. And again at the Pequot House at New London on the eve of a
varsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of money and taunts
at Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded feet and
frightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob's cents, at the sum
total of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of Yale money