hare
the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his
forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he
had prophesied the failure of "the system."

His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had known
him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy.
Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it;
but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and
think.

They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling, even
after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their
companion to go unhonored to its grave; separately they wished to do
so--in community they were ashamed; and Pisgah had half a hope that
somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly:

"The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. God knows which of us
will take the next turn."

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried
alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the
light of an influential spirit.

IV.

THE DESPERATE CHANCE.

During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus
train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a
refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France,
thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the
turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched
little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were
Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the "off" horse, as he had
done for the better part of his life.

Risque's uncle had been a great Mississippi jobber; he took U. S. postal
contracts for all the unknown world; route of the first class, six
horses and daily; route of the second class, semi-weekly and four
horses; third class, two horses and weekly; fourth class, one horse, one
saddle, and one small boy.

The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to
the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never
be faithfully said to have learned to _walk_; and recalls, as the first
incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives,
teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Washita stage.

Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the
decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or
night, in rain or fog or burn