e out loud.

"What is a gentleman?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might
take his mind off himself a little to tell me. "What MAKES one?"

"Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair,
and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. "I
heard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day."

Well, speaking personal, I never had smelled none of roses. I wasn't
nothing but trash myself, so being a gentleman didn't bother me one way
or the other. The only reason I didn't want to see them niggers bunked
so very bad was only jest because it was such a low-down, ornery kind of
trick.

"It ain't too late," I says, "to pull out of this nigger scheme yet and
get into something more honest."

"I don't know," he says thoughtful. "I think perhaps it IS too late."
And he sets there looking like a man that is going over a good many
years of life in his mind. Purty soon he says:

"As far as honesty goes--it isn't that so much, O
Daniel-come-to-judgment! It's about as honest as most medicine games.
It's--" He stopped and frowned agin.

"What is it?"

"It's their being NIGGERS," he says.

That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno how, nor why.

"I've tried nearly everything but blackmail," he says, "and I'll
probably be trying that by this time next year, if this scheme fails.
But there's something about their being niggers that makes me sick of
this thing already--just as the time has come to make the start. And
I don't know WHY it should, either." He slipped another big slug of
whiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me:

"Do you know what's the matter with me?"

I asts him what.

"I'm too decent to be a crook," he says, "and too crooked to be decent.
You've got to be one thing or the other steady to make it pay."

Then he says:

"Did you ever hear of the descent to Avernus, Danny?"

"I might," I tells him, "and then agin I mightn't, but if I ever did, I
don't remember what she is. What is she?"

"It's the chute to the infernal regions," he says. "They say it's
greased. But it isn't. It's really no easier sliding down than it is
climbing back."

Well, I seen this nigger scheme of our'n wasn't the only thing that was
troubling Doctor Kirby that night. It was thinking of all the schemes
like it in the years past he had went into, and how he had went into 'em
light-hearted and more'n half fur fun when he was a young man, and
now he wasn't fitten fur