Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
The Judge paws out a place for her and I go along to watch. She pries
open a bead reticule that my mother had one like and gets out a knitted
silk purse, and takes a five-dollar gold piece into her little bony
white fingers and drops it on a number, and says: "Now that is well
over!" But it wasn't over. There was excitement right off, because,
outside of some silver dollars I'd lost myself, I hadn't seen anything
bigger than a two-bit piece played there that night. Right over my
shoulder I heard heavy breathing and I didn't have to turn round to know
it was Cora Wales. When the ball slowed up she quit breathing entirely
till it settled.
It must of been a horrible strain on her, for the man was raking in all
the little bets and leaving the five-dollar one that win. Say! That
woman gripped an arm of mine till I thought it was caught in machinery
of some kind! And Mrs. Doc Martingale, that she gripped on the other
side, let out a yell of agony. But that wasn't the worst of Cora Wales'
torture. No, sir! She had to stand there and watch this little
old-fashioned sport from South Carolina refuse the money!
"But I can't accept it from you good people," says she in her thin
little voice. "I intended to help the cause of those poor sufferers, and
to profit by the mere inadvertence of your toy there would be
unspeakable--really no!"
And she pushed back the five and the hundred and seventy-five that the
dealer had counted out for her, dusted her little fingers with a little
lace handkerchief smelling of lavender, and asked the Judge to show her
a game that wasn't so noisy.
I guess Cora Wales was lost from that moment. She had Len over in a
corner again, telling him how easy it was to win, and how this poor
demented creature had left all hers there because Judge Ballard probably
didn't want to create a scene by making her take it; and mustn't they
have a lot of trouble looking after the weak-minded thing all the time!
And I could hear her say if one person could do it another could,
especially if they had learned how to get in tune with the Infinite. Len
says all right, how much does she want to risk? And that scares her
plumb stiff again, in spite of her uncanny powers. She says it wouldn't
be right to risk one cent unless she could be sure the number was going
to win.
Of course if you made your claim on the Universal, your own was bound to
come to you; still, you couldn't be so sure as you ought to be with a
roulette wheel, because several times the ball had gone into numbers
that she wasn't holding for with her psychic grip, and the uncertainty
was killing her; and why didn't he say something to help her, instead of
standing there silent and letting their little home slip from her grasp?
Cousin Egbert comes up just then, still happy and puffed up; so I put
him wise to this Wales conspiracy against his game.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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