fireplace.”
“Ba-a-li,” growled Jerome.
“The truth hurts, I know,” Webster pursued relentlessly, “but hear me to the bitter end. And then presently shall enter the club no less a personage than young John Stuart Webster, even as he entered it to-day. He will be smelling of country with the hair on, and he will glance toward Table Number Four and murmur sympathetically: 'Poor old Jerome! I knowed him good!' Did I hear you say 'Huh!' just then? I thank thee for teaching me that word. Take careful note and see I use it correctly—'Huh!' Dad burn you, Neddy, I'm not a Methuselah. I want some fun in life. I want to fight and be broke and go hungry and then make money for the love of making it and spending it, and I want to live a long time yet. I have a constitutional weakness for foregathering with real he-men, doing real he-things, and if I'm to be happy, I'll just naturally have to be the he-est of the whole confounded pack! I want to see the mirage across the sagebrush and hear it whisper: 'Hither, John Stuart Webster! Hither, you fool, and I'll hornswaggle you again, as in an elder day I horn,swaggled you before.'”
Jerome shook his white thatch hopelessly.
“I thought you were a great mining engineer, John,” he said sadly, “but you're not. You're a poet. You do not seem to care for money.”
“Well,” Webster retorted humorously, “it isn't exactly what you might term a ruling passion. I like to make it, but there's more fun spending it. I've made a hundred thousand dollars, and now I want to go blow it—and I'm going to. Do not try to argue with me. I'm a lunatic and I will have my way. If I didn't go tearing off to Sobrante and join forces with Billy Geary, there to play the game, red or black, I'd feel as if I had done something low and mean and small. The boy's appealed to me, and I have made my answer. If I come back alive but broke, you know in your heart you'll give me the best job you have.”
“You win,” poor Jerome admitted.
“Hold the job open thirty days. At the end of that period I'll give you a definite answer, Neddy.”
“There is no Balm in Gilead,” Jerome replied sadly. “Blessed are they that expect nothing,
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