Riverside. Then, too,
his body suffered from lack of exercise; and, from lack of decent human
associations, his moral fibres were weakening. Never a man to hide
anything, some of his escapades became public, such as speeding, and of
joy-rides in his big red motor-car down to San Jose with companions
distinctly sporty--incidents that were narrated as good fun and
comically in the newspapers.

Nor was there anything to save him. Religion had passed him by. "A
long time dead" was his epitome of that phase of speculation. He was
not interested in humanity. According to his rough-hewn sociology, it
was all a gamble. God was a whimsical, abstract, mad thing called
Luck. As to how one happened to be born--whether a sucker or a
robber--was a gamble to begin with; Luck dealt out the cards, and the
little babies picked up the hands allotted them. Protest was vain.
Those were their cards and they had to play them, willy-nilly,
hunchbacked or straight backed, crippled or clean-limbed, addle-pated
or clear-headed. There was no fairness in it. The cards most picked
up put them into the sucker class; the cards of a few enabled them to
become robbers. The playing of the cards was life--the crowd of
players, society.

The table was the earth, and the earth, in lumps and chunks, from
loaves of bread to big red motor-cars, was the stake. And in the end,
lucky and unlucky, they were all a long time dead.

It was hard on the stupid lowly, for they were coppered to lose from
the start; but the more he saw of the others, the apparent winners, the
less it seemed to him that they had anything to brag about. They, too,
were a long time dead, and their living did not amount to much. It was
a wild animal fight; the strong trampled the weak, and the strong, he
had already discovered,--men like Dowsett, and Letton, and
Guggenhammer,--were not necessarily the best. He remembered his miner
comrades of the Arctic. They were the stupid lowly, they did the hard
work and were robbed of the fruit of their toil just as was the old
woman making wine in the Sonoma hills; and yet they had finer qualities
of truth, and loyalty, and square-dealing than did the men who robbed
them. The winners seemed to be the crooked ones, the unfaithful ones,
the wicked ones. And even they had no say in the matter. They played
the cards that were given them; and Luck, the monstrous, mad-god thing,
the owner of the whole shebang, looked on and grinned. It w