been playing
cards for money, but I never should have suspected it--of you."

Daniels shook his head gravely. "No get-rich-quick games for me. My luck
doesn't come that way. But it cost me nearly two thousand dollars to find
it out. I've always meant to tell you about that, sometime. That two
thousand dollars was all my capital when I came to Seattle to take my
course in journalism. I expected it to see me through. But, well, it was
my first week at the University--fortunately I had paid the expenses of
the first semester in advance--when one night a couple of fellows I knew
brought me down to see the town. I didn't know much about a city then; I
had grown up over in the sage-brush country, and I never had heard of a
highball. To start with I had two, then I got interested in a game of
roulette, and the last I remember I was learning to play poker. But I must
have had more high-balls; the boys said afterwards they left me early in
the evening with a new acquaintance; they couldn't get me to go home. I
never knew how I got back to the dorm, and the next day, when I woke, the
stubs of my checkbook showed I had signed practically all of my two
thousand away."

There was a brief silence. Out in the main room the orchestra began to
play. Miss Atkins was looking at Jimmie, and her scarlet lips were closed
like a straight cord.

He drew his hand over his smooth, close-cut, dark hair and took a long
draught from his glass of ice-water. "I can't make you understand how I
felt about it," he went on, "but that two thousand was the price of my
father's ranch over near the Columbia. It stood for years of privation,
heart-breaking toil, and disappointment--the worst kind. Two seasons of
drouth we saw the whole wheat crop blister and go to ruin. I carried water
in buckets from the river up to that plateau day after day, just to keep
our home garden and a little patch of grass alive. And mother carried too
up that breaking slope in the desert sun. It was thinking of that made me--
all in. She worked the same way with the stock. Something lacking in the
soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair;
their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim
of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for
rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed.
It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to
finish. And we, Dad and I, didn'