“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.

“You boys just let me alone,” he said. “Me lose? Lucky Cochran? Not by the mill by the damsite. Why—say!—I’m still winner by nigh onto four hundred dollars. Can’t beat that, kin you?”

They exhorted him for his own protection to stop and call his four hundred an ample winning. He appeared to ponder it, and then blurted: “But what’s a feller to do when he’s out on the fust vacation he’s had for more’n forty year, if he can’t play a few keerds—huh? Here! Tell you what me’ll and you’ll do! We’ll go in and play penny ante and cut them fellers out. What say?”

The partners flatly refused this proffered amusement, remembering that Mr. Cochran would have them completely at the mercy of his interminable, unquenchable drawl. Anxious as they were to 

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