At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the stars glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson somehow managed to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused himself to the Innocent by saying that he had “often been a week without sleep.”
“Doing what?” asked Tom. “Poker!” replied Oakhurst sententiously. “When a man gets a streak of luck nigger-luck he don`t get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck,” continued the gambler reflectively,“ is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for certain is that it`s bound to change. And it`s finding out when it`s going to change that makes you. We`ve had a streak of bad luck since we left Poker Flat you come along, and, slap, you get into it, too. If you can hold your cards right along you`re all right. For,” added the gambler, with cheerful irrelevance
`“I`m proud to live in the service of the Lord,
And I`m bound to die in his army.`”
White curtained valley
The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the casta-ways still clung.
Through the marvelously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. “Just you go out there and cuss, and see.” She then set herself to the task of amusing “the child,” as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, but it was a soothing and original theory of the pair thus to account for the fact that she didn`t swear and wasn`t improper.
When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering camp-fire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney, story telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have failed too, but for the Innocent.
Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope`s ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed narrate the principal incidents of that poem having thoroughly mustered the argument and fairly forgotten the words in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric gods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canon seemed to bow I (lie wrath of the son of Peleus.,Mr. Oakhurst listened with quie. Most especially was he interested in the fate of “Ash-heels,” as tin- Innocent persisted in denominating the “swift-footed Achilles.”
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