“Indeed?” She looked at him earnestly for a moment, and then added: “I should think you would have seen lost chances; and doing things a second time might do them better.”
“I never missed chances,” he replied, simply: “never except twice, and then--”
“Then it was to give the other fellow a chance.”
“Oh!” There was a kind of dubiousness in her tone. He noticed it. “You can hardly understand, Miss Raglan. Fact is, it was one of those deals when you can make a million, in a straight enough game; but it comes out of another man--one, maybe, that you don’t know; who is playing just the same as you are. I have had a lot of sport; but I’ve never crippled any one man, when my engine has been dead on him. I have played more against organisations than single men.”
“What was the most remarkable chance you ever had to make a million, and did not?”
He threw back his head, smiling shrewdly. “When by accident my enemy got hold of a telegram meant for me. I was standing behind a frosted glass door, and through the narrow bevel of clear glass I watched him read it. I never saw a struggle like that. At last he got up, snatched an envelope, put the telegram inside, wrote my name, and called a messenger. I knew what was in the message. I let the messenger go, and watched that man for ten minutes. It was a splendid sight. The telegram had given him a big chance to make a million or two, as he thought. But he backed himself against the temptation, and won. That day I could have put the ball into his wicket; but I didn’t. That’s a funny case of the kind.”
“He didn’t. We are fighting yet. He is richer than I am now, and at this moment he’s playing a hard game straight at several interests of mine. But I reckon I can stop him.”
“You must get a great deal out of life,” she said. “Have you always enjoyed it so?” She was thinking it would be strange to live in contact with such events very closely. It was so like adventure.
“Tell me something of it all, won’t you?” He did not hesitate.
“I was born in a little place in Maine. My mother was a good woman, they said--straight as a die all her life. I can only remember her in a kind of dream, when she used to gather us children about the big rocking-chair, and pray for us, and for my father, who was away most of the time, working in the timber-shanties in the winter, and at odd things in the summer. My father wasn’t much of a man. He was kind-hearted, but shiftless, but pretty handsome for a man from Maine.