fetish o' sons o' men to-day. 'Twould not be simple cards for drink
y'd play! Bigger stakes--bigger stakes, boys! He'd bait men's souls
wi' bigger stakes! If I were young I'd take his bet an' play for the
biggest stakes outside o' Hell--"

"Hey? What is that?" queried Brydges; and he winked at Wayland. "We'd
been talking of a bunco game when you came up."

"Y' had, had you?" The old frontiersman measured Brydges through and
through. "Well, judging from y'r brass an' the up-and-coming kind of
it, A'm thinking y'r stakes would be pea-nuts under little shells!
'Tis bigger stakes I'd play for if I had m' life to live over--"

"What?" asked Wayland curiously.

Mr. Bat Brydges was revising his inventory of the old "duffer."
Wayland was laughing openly. The old man had become oblivious of both,
with a triangling of sharply intersected lines between his brows and
tense compression of the lips--

"The--fate--o'--this--land," he ripped out in hammer raps, "the fate of
this land, boys, with all time lookin' on since ever Time began! Y're
the fiery furnace of all the world's hopes and fears, of all earth's
people, of all poets' dreams; an' God only knows what a mess o' slag
y're turning out! Y'r muck rakers are belching y'r failures to the
four corners of earth! Justice perverted! Courts in fee to the
highest bidder! More murders--murders in this fresh new clean land
than all the stew pots o' filth the old nations have brewed in a
thousand years; and murders unpunished! Y'r Government--the great
world experiment--is it the wull o' the people, or the wull of a gilded