Rich Crooks/Chapter 1

OW and then people have got in my way, and bullets have been used. But it is another thing to kill a man in what is called cold blood. Every one of us has perhaps wondered that God has let certain people live and each of us has probably wished for the daring to do what God should—in our opinion. He knows all about everybody and that perhaps makes the difference, since circumstantial evidence has no influence on Him. That perhaps explains why He lets some people live on and on, though perhaps not why others die.

There came a time when I held the lives of two men in my hands and did not know which to throw away. One had killed a woman and the other had believed evil things of her. For a time I felt that the latter was even the more deserving of death and I was sure that both had lived too long, yet I hesitated to wink at the death of either. Contrary to the opinion that many people have of me, I am scrupulous about certain things.

“Don Everhard,” a wrathful, youthful cousin of mine had once said in a tone of disappointment and disgust, “you talk like a preacher!”

He had encountered certain scruples of mine and had angrily searched for the most crushing thing he could say to a professional gambler who was usually spoken of in the newspapers, as a “gun-fighter” and occasionally faintly damned by the police—who were, as frequently, wrong—for a “clever crook.”

This is essentially a complicated story because from first to last it covers many years and involves the motives and wickedness of more than one man. Sheer luck, if not accident, twice brought me into the plot; though I sometimes suspect Fate of being too thoughtful a dramatist to leave anything to mere chance.

In a way, what I have to tell come about because Jack Richmond, that same cousin, got himself engaged to Cora Cornwall. When I learned that her name was Cornwall and that she came from Utah, I had reason to meditate interestedly.

In my youth, our family, a rather large one, had been land-poor in southern California, but Jack came of age and into possession of an oil field all his own. He arrived with his pockets full of money to camp on my door-step. His imagination had been fired by what he had heard of me, in spite of the censorship which heads of our family had maintained. I was the “disgrace,” and he had ambitions to follows in my tracks. But, as I have said, he fell in love.

Ordinarily, I do not interfere with the folly of other people, not even of my own cousins, but I had dragged him almost by the ears from a card table and he was indignant. So he classed me with a preacher, which was not without its complimentary angle. I really could not blame him for gambling, since we had the same grandfather back of us and there was a strong undertow in our blood to do the things for which he had been famous.