The new city officials, most of them greatly surprised to find themselves elected, were to take office January first, and it was one day about the middle of December that Steve Turrill came to the front door of the little manse and asked for David. 'Thusia, who came to the door, knew Turrill. She had known him years before, when she was a thoughtless, pleasure-mad young girl. Even then Steve had been a gambler and fond of a fast horse. In those days Steve would often disappear for months at a time, for the steamboats were gambling palaces. He never returned until his pockets were full of money and his mouth full of tales of Memphis, Cairo, St. Louis and even New Orleans. He was known in all the gambling places up and down the Mississippi. At the beginning of the Civil War Steve Turrill had enlisted, returning, after about five months service, with a bullet in his leg just below the left hip. The bullet was never found. After that Steve walked with a cane and on damp days one could see him in a chair in front of the Riverbank Hotel, his forehead creased with pain and his left hand ceaselessly rubbing his left hip. When his hip was worst he could not sit still at the gaming table. To the gambler's pallor was added the pallor of pain. As a boy I remember him sitting under the iron canopy of the hotel. We all knew he was a gambler, and he was the only gambler we knew. Sometimes he would have a trotter, and we would see him flash down the street behind the red-nostriled animal; sometimes even the diamond horseshoe in his tie and the rings on his fingers would be gone. Everyone seemed to speak to Steve Turrill. Even as a boy I knew, vaguely, that he had a room in the Riverbank Hotel where people went to gamble. It was understood that not everyone could gamble there. I think there was a feeling that Steve Turrill was “straight,” and that as he had been wounded in the war, and was the last professional gambler Riverbank would have, he should not be bothered. I believe he was always a sick man and that, from the day he returned from the war, Death stood constantly at his side. He looked as if Death's hand had touched him. His thin, sharp features were ashen gray at times and his hands were mere bones covered with transparent skin. He never smiled. He never touched liquor. He smoked a long, thin cigar that he had made especially for his own use; I suppose Doc Benedict had told him how much he could smoke and remain alive. When 'Thusia saw him at the door (it was one of her “well” days) she was not startled; for many odd fish come to a dominie's door from one end of the year to the next. He leaned on his cane and took off his gray felt hat. “'Day, 'Thusia,” he said, quite as if they had not been strangers for years; “I wonder if Mr. Dean is in?” “He's in,” said 'Thusia, “but this is the afternoon he works on his sermon. He tries not to see anyone.”