a month of the day on which he had
proved himself so signally unfitted for the _role_ of rascal, he had
thrown up his position and cut himself loose from all his old moorings.
It was in a spirit of fantastic knight-errantry that he turned his face
westward, a spirit that gave him no rest until, at the end of many
months, he finally dropped anchor in the riotous little harbor of Lame
Gulch. This turbulent haven seemed to promise every facility for the
shipwreck on which he had so perversely set his heart, and he was
content to wait there for whatever storm or collision should bring
matters to a crisis. Perhaps the mere steady under-tow would suck him
down to destruction. The under-tow is not inconsiderable among the
seething currents of life in a two-year-old mining-camp.

Dirke had not been long in the camp, before his indefeasible air of
integrity and respectability had attracted the attention of no less a
personage than the proprietor of the roulette wheel, who invited him to
run the wheel on a salary. It was now some three months since he had
entered upon this vocation, and it had, on the whole, been a
disappointment to him. He had accepted the position with an idea that he
should be playing the sinister _role_ of tempter, that he should feel
himself at last acting a very evil part. To his surprise and chagrin he
found that he was conscious of no moral relation whatever with the
victims of the wheel. It was not he who enticed them; it was not he who
impoverished them. On the contrary, given his contract with the "bank,"
he was doing his duty as simply and scrupulously here as in the Wall
Street office, performing a certain function for certain pay,
accountable to an employer now as hitherto. And, indeed, when he
reflected upon the glimpses of Wall Street methods he had got, and upon
the incalculable turns of the Wall Street wheel, whirling its creatures
into opulence or penury as capriciously as the roulette wheel itself, he
could not but feel that he was serving the same master now as
heretofore, and to very much the same ends. And now, as heretofore, he
had no reassuring sense of being on the downward path.

He used to amuse himself during the day,--for his time was his own from
dawn to dark,--in trying to work out the law of averages, following out
the hints he gathered from the working of the wheel. He had always had a
taste for mathematics, having rather "gone in" for that branch at
college. Fleeting visions of