A humour the most cool and reckless imaginable now possessed P.
Sybarite. The first flush of his unaccustomed libations seemed to have
worn itself out, his more recent draught to have had no other effect
than to steady his gratulate senses; and a certain solid comfort
resided in the knowledge that his hard-earned five dollars reposed in
safe deposit.
"They can't get _that_ away from me--not so long as I'm able to kick,"
he reflected with huge satisfaction.
And the seven hundred and thirty-five in his pocket was possessed of a
devil of restlessness. He could almost feel it quivering with
impatience to get into action. After all, it was only seven hundred
and thirty-five dollars: not a cent more than the wages of forty-nine
weeks' servitude to the Genius of the Vault of the Smell!
"That," mused P. Sybarite scornfully, "won't take me far....
"What," he argued, "is the use of travelling if you can't go to the
end of the line?...
"I might as well be broke," he asseverated, "as the way I am!"
Glancing cunningly down his nose, he saw the finish of a fool.
"Anyway," he insisted, "it was ever my fondest ambition to get rid of
precisely seven hundred and thirty-five dollars in one hour by the
clock."
So he sat down at the end of the table of his first winnings, and
exchanged one of his seven big bills for one hundred white chips.
"What," he asked with an ingenious smile, "is the maximum?"
"Seein's it's you," said the croupier, grinning, "we'll make it twenty
a throw."
"Such being the case"--P. Sybarite pushed back the little army of
white chips--"you may give me twenty dark-brown counters for
these...."
In ten minutes he had lost two hundred dollars.
At the end of twenty minutes, he exchanged his last thirty-five
dollars for seven brown chips.
Ten minutes later, he was worth eighteen hundred dollars; in another
ten, he had before him counters calling for five thousand or
thereabouts.
"It is," he observed privately--"it must be my Day of Days!"