change the whole face of the Brownley
destiny--those same gambling microbes are in my blood, and when they begin
to claw and gnaw I want to do something; and, Jim"--and the big brown eyes
suddenly shot sparks--"if those microbes ever get unleashed, there'll be
mischief to pay on the floor--sure there will!"

Bob's handsome head was thrown back; his thin nostrils dilated as though
there was in them the breath of conflict. The lips were drawn across the
white teeth with just part enough to show their edges, and in the depths
of the eyes was a dark-red blaze that somehow gave the impression one gets
in looking down some long avenue of black at the instant a locomotive
headlight rounds a curve at night.

Twice before, way back in our college days, I had had a peep at this
gambling tempter of Bob's. Once in a poker game in our rooms, when a crowd
of New York classmates tried to run him out of a hand by the sheer weight
of coin. And again at the Pequot House at New London on the eve of a
varsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of money and taunts
at Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded feet and
frightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob's cents, at the sum
total of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of Yale money
and came to with a white face streaming with cold perspiration. These
events had passed out of my memory as the ordinary student breaks that any
hot-blooded youth is liable to make in like circumstances. As I looked at
Bob that day, while he tried to tell me that the business of Randolph &
Randolph would not be safe in his keeping, I had to admit to myself that I
was puzzled. I had regarded my old college chum not only as the best
mentally harnessed man I had ever met, but I knew him as the soul of
honour, that honour of the old story-books, and I could not credit his
being tempted to jeopardise unfairly the rights or property of another.
But it was habit with me to let Bob have his way, and I did not press him
to come into our firm as a full partner.

Five years later, during which time affairs, business and social, had been
slipping along as well as either Bob or I could have asked, I was
preparing for another sit-down to show my chum that the time had now come
for him to help me in earnest, when a queer thing happened--one of those
unaccountable incidents that God sometimes sees fit to drop across the
life-paths of His children, paths heretofore as straight an