It was due to my attack of climate fever that I missed the most exciting
thing which happened on the voyage. I refer to the incident of the
professional gamblers and the youth from Jersey City. From the very
first there was one passenger who had been picked out by all the knowing
passengers as a professional gambler; for he was the very spit-and-image
of a professional gambler as we have learned to know him in story books.
Did he not dress in plain black, without any jewelry? He certainly did.
Did he not have those long, slender, flexible fingers? Such was,
indeed, the correct description of those fingers. Was not his eye a keen
steely-blue eye that seemed to have the power of looking right through
you? Steely-blue was the right word, all right. Well, then, what more
could you ask?
Behind his back sinister yet fascinating rumors circulated. He was the
brilliant but unscrupulous scion of a haughty house in England. He had
taken a first degree at Oxford, over there, and the third one at police
headquarters, over here. Women simply could not resist him. Let him make
up his mind to win a woman and she was a gone gosling. His picture
was to be found in rogues' galleries and ladies' lockets. And sh-h-h!
Listen! Everybody knew he was the identical crook who, disguised in
woman's clothes, escaped in the last lifeboat that left the sinking
Titanic. Who said so? Why--er--everybody said so!
It came as a grievous disappointment to all when we found out the truth,
which was that he was the booking agent for a lyceum bureau, going
abroad to sign up some foreign talent for next season's Chautauquas;
and the only gambling he had ever done was on the chance of whether
the Tyrolian Yodelers would draw better than our esteemed secretary of
state--or vice versa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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