His entrance was followed by an
exhibition as though a ghost had suddenly appeared at the conventional
midnight hour and demanded a hand, as he reached forth his rattling
joints of bone. The men stared, even our hero for just one instant lost
his equipoise, but he recovered when like a wink he asked, as though no
one had entered the room:
"What do you do?"
The men, however, just sat and stared while the intruder said, a pallor
on his emaciated face and a glitter in his eyes:
"I heard the game going on, boys, and I could not resist--oh, I love a
little game at times."
"You are not well enough to sit up yet, Mr. Alling."
"Oh, yes; I feel better to-day; but whom have we here?"
One of the men winked and said:
"A friend of ours--one of the four hundred--but he ain't proud. He is a
gentleman clean through."
The man who had asked the question fixed his glittering eyes on our
hero. The dude appeared unconscious of the fact that he was undergoing a
study beneath the gaze of a man who could read the human face like a
book.
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