The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to
the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never
be faithfully said to have learned to _walk_; and recalls, as the first
incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives,
teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Washita stage.
Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the
decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or
night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid
south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep
in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at
silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous;
past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its
teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the
negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat
to bow--here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard,
pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding
behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his
destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were
picked.
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