302 A Blackjack Bargainer
of a few thousand dollars, next the old family home, and latterly the last shreds of his self- respect and manhood. The "gang" had cleaned him out. The broken gambler had turned drunkard and parasite; he had lived to see this day come when the men who had stripped him denied him a seat at the game. His word was no longer to be taken. The daily bouts at cards had arranged itself ac- cordingly, and to him was assigned the ig- noble part of the onlooker. The sheriff, the county clerk, a sportive deputy, a gay at- torney, and a chalk-faced man hailing "from the valley," sat at table, and the sheared one was thus tacitly advised to go and grow more wool.
Soon wearying of his ostracism, Goree had departed for his office, muttering to himself as he unsteadily traversed the unlucky path- way. After a drink of corn whiskey from a demijohn under the table, he had flung him- self into the chair, staring, in a sort of maudlin apathy, out at the mountains immersed in the summer haze. The little white patch he saw away up on the side of Blackjack was Laurel, the village near which he had been born and bred. There, also, was the birth-
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