Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/343

 the alleged gambler remarked, with some significance, that I had taken a very wise and safe resolution for a stranger travelling through the southern states.

After watching the game for some time, I retired to bed; and rising pretty early the next morning, since the journey was to be renewed. at five o'clock, I found them still at it: the two northern dupes haggard with want of sleep, and their very lengthened faces, distorted with ill-suppressed anxiety and suffering, seeming to have grown ten years older in that single night. They bore, in fact, but a distant resemblance to the two spruce, sleek gentlemen with whom I had ridden the day before. The other seemed as fresh and self-possessed as at the moment he had sat down; and as [entered the room, he took up and pock-. eted, with a graceful nonchalance that was quite admirable, the last stakes, and as it proved, too, the last money of his two companions.

Having sat down, as I afterwards learned, with only ten dollars in his pocket, as his whole means and stock in trade, he had made a good night of it. In the morning he had not less than two thousand, besides a fine mulatto boy of fifteen or sixteen, whom one of the planters had made over to him by way of squaring accounts.

Finding our two companions quite drained, he insisted upon paying their tavern bills himself, and upon lending each of them fifty dollars, as a fund to go upon till they could obtain further remittances; and this he did with as unconscious an air of sympathy and commiseration as if they had lost their money by some accident, instead of his having himself been the agent of their loss, by means not merely of his superior coolness and skill, but probably, also, by some other tricks of his profession. Not the master, who tosses a dollar to his slave by way of Christmas present, could do it with a greater air of generosity.:

It was curious to remark the crestfallen air of the Boston cotton broker and the New York editor, after the loss of their money. The day before, they had