"
"You will laugh that it was so, a week hence," answered Auburn
Risque--"when you lunch at Peters' while awaiting my third check for a
thousand dollars apiece."
"I don't believe in the system," growled Lees, opening a cold draft from
his melancholy eyes: "I don't feel that I shall ever spend a sou of the
winnings. No more will any of you. There will be no winnings to spend.
Auburn Risque will lose. He always does."
"If you were standing by at the play I should," cried Risque, while the
pock-marks in his face were like the thawings of ice. "You would croak
like an old raven, and I should forget my reckoning."
"Come now, Lees," cried all the others; "you must not see bad omen for
the Colony;" and they said, in undertone, that Lees had come to be quite
a bore.
They were all doubtful, nevertheless. Their crisis could not be
exaggerated. Their interest was almost devout. Three thousand miles from
relief; two seas between, one of water and one of fire; at home,
conscription, captivity, death: the calamity of Southerners abroad would
merit all sympathy, if it had not been induced by waste, and unredeemed
by either fortitude or regret.
The unhappy Freckle, whose luckless admiration of the rest had been his
ruin, felt that a sonorous prayer, such as his old father used to make
in the Methodist meeting-house, would be a good thing wherewith to
freight Auburn Risque for his voyage.
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