Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/59

Rh only thing both of us know is 'Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep'."

"Fine and dandy," the gambler applauded. "There's nothing I like better than a good hymn."

Davenport displaced the professor at the piano and to his accompaniment I sang that bass sailor's dirge. It was, now that I think of it, my professional debut as a singer, and a singularly gratifying one, too, after a fashion. Certainly I never since have sung any song to quite such a response. Something more than ten thousand feet above sea level and one thousand miles away, the citizens of Leadville appealed to me as reasonably safe from watery graves, and, so I assumed, apt to be correspondingly indifferent to a sailor's woes. Any of them were likely enough to be carried off suddenly by Colonel Colt or timber-line pneumonia, but there was not enough water within many rifle shots to drown a litter of kittens. And though the song is not exactly hilarious, I never had thought of it as likely to wring a tear from any one less susceptible than the immediate family of a lost mariner.

The roulette wheels were stilled, the faro banks closed, the poker players laid down their