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ARTWELL was not without offers of employment next day. Malvina wanted to put him in as night clerk in her office, a place created out of her generosity for the sole purpose of offering it to him. Not that a night clerk was not needed in the Woodbine Hotel, indeed, for people came in at all hours, many of them boisterous, more of them sullen and red-eyed and mean from liquor and losses at the gambling joints.

But Texas refused it with grateful expressions, only to be waited on a little while later by Jud Springer, the gambler whose house had been closed by the mayor's one-sided application of his own law. Springer had come back with three quick-handed friends behind him, and was planning to reopen his place that night. He wanted to put Texas in as chief of his squad, and offered big inducements in in the remunerative way.

This offer Texas also was obliged to put behind him, with such modest discount of his competency as to lift him to the pinnacle of the gambler's respect. He had no intention of taking sides with