D--n quick. Do you hear?" and black
Tom answered, "Yas, suh."
To be brief, I was three weeks on my back, and bluff old Bill Bradley
nursed me like a loving mother would a sick child. Day and night he hung
over me, never a thing did I need but what he procured for me, and one
day after the fever had left me and I was sitting up by an open window,
I said,
"Mr. Bradley, what do you do for a living?"
"Boy," he replied with a flushed face, "I am sorry you asked that
question, but sooner or later you would have heard it and I'd a great
deal rather tell you about it myself. I'm a gambler and these three
rooms adjoin my place which is called the "Three Nines," and then he
told me the story of his life. He was a son of a fine Connecticut
family, a graduate of Harvard, and in his day had been a very able young
lawyer with brilliant prospects, but one night, he went out with a crowd
of roystering chaps, the lie was passed, and--it was the old story,--he
came to Texas for a refuge. The great civil war was just over, the
country in a chaotic state, and there he had remained ever since.
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