ed Sam trying them drugs onto
him. He wanted MONEY, and he wanted it so bad he was ready and willing
to take up with most any wild scheme to make it.

They was something about him now that didn't fit in much with the Doctor
Kirby I had knowed. It seemed like he had spells when he saw himself how
he had changed. He wasn't gay and joking all the time like he had been
before, neither. I guess the doctor was getting along toward fifty years
old. I suppose he thought if he was ever going to get anything out of
his gift of the gab he better settle down to something, and quit fooling
around, and do it right away. But it looked to me like he might never
turn the trick. Fur he was drinking right smart all the time. Drinking
made him think a lot, and thinking was making him look old. He was
more'n one year older than he had been a year ago.

He kept a quart bottle in his room now. The night after we had took Sam
to see Doctor Jackson we was setting in his room, and he was hitting it
purty hard.

"Danny," he says to me, after a while, like he was talking out loud to
himself too, "what did you think of Doctor Jackson?"

"I don't like him much," I says.

"Nor I," he says, frowning, and takes a drink. Then he says, after quite
a few minutes of frowning and thinking, under his breath like: "He's a
blame sight more decent than I am, for all of that."

"Why?" I asts him.

"Because Doctor Jackson," he says, "hasn't the least idea that he ISN'T
decent, and getting his money in a decent way. While at one time I
was--"

He breaks off and don't say what he was. I asts him. "I was going to
say a gentleman," he says, "but on reflection, I doubt if I was ever
anything but a cheap imitation. I never heard a man say that he was
a gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him. Also," he goes on,
working himself into a better humour again with the sound of his own
voice, "if I HAD ever been a gentleman at any time, enough of it would
surely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man who
cheats niggers."

He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around the
country couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if he
had ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if you
will, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still.

I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself
when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time it
happens to b