“Shore does,” answered Mr. Dale.  “I should say so.  Dunno who’d oughta know that better’n I do.  Trouble, Racey—­well, say, I’m just made of trouble I am.”

“Aw, it ain’t as bad as that,” encouraged Racey.

“Yes, it is, too,” contradicted the other.  “I got more trouble on my hands than a rat-tailed hoss tied short in fly-time.  Trouble—­nothing but.”

“Nothing is as bad as it looks.”

“Heaps of times she’s worse.”

“I’m yore friend.  You know me.  If I can help you—­”

“Nobody can help me.  I dunno what to do, Racey.”

“Well, you know best, I expect, but I’ve always found if I talk over with somebody else anythin’ that bothers me it don’t seem to stick up half so big.”

Mr. Dale sank down upon one run-over heel and stared blearily off across the flats.  The bottle in his hip-pocket made a pronounced bulge under the cloth.

“I dunno what to do, Racey,” he said, looking up sidewise at Racey where he stood in front of him, his hands in his pockets and his hat on the back of his head.  “I owe a lot of money.  I dunno how I’m gonna pay it, and I’m worried.”

“Let the other feller do the worrying,” suggested Racey.

“I wish I could,” said Mr. Dale, drearily.  “I wish I could.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“He’ll foreclose—­they’ll foreclose, I mean.”

“Aw, maybe not.”

“Yeah, they will.  I know ’em! ——­ ’em!  They’d have the shirt off my back if they could.  You see, Racey, she’s thisaway:  I borrowed five thousand dollars from the Marysville bank, on a mortgage, and there they went and sold the mortgage to Lanpher of the 88 and Luke Tweezy.  And there’s the rub, Racey.  The bank would ‘a’ renewed all right, but you can put down a bet and go the limit that Lanpher and Tweezy won’t.  I done asked ’em.”

“Five thousand dollars is a lot of money,” said Racey, soberly.  He had been thinking that the mortgage would not have been above two thousand at the outside.  But five thousand!  What in Sam Hill had old Dale done with the money?  In the next breath Dale answered the unspoken question.

“I needed the money,” he said in a low voice, his eyes lowered, “and—­and I had bad luck with it.”

“Yeah, I know, the cattle dying and all.”

“Cattle!  What cattle?” Mr. Dale stared blankly at Racey.  “Oh, them!  Hell, they didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, them cattle didn’t.  I’d worked out a system, Racey—­a system to beat roulette, and I was shore it was all right.  By Gawd, it was all right!  They was nothin’ wrong with that system.  But I had bad luck.  I had most awful bad luck.”

“And the system, I take it, didn’t work?”

“It didn’t—­against my bad luck.”

Mr. Dale again dropped his eyes, and Racey stared down at the hump-shouldered old figure with something akin to pity in his gaze.  Certainly he was sorry for him.  He was not in the least scornful despite the fact that it did not seem possible that any sensible man could be such a fool.  A system—­a system to beat roulette!  And bad luck!  The drably ancient and moth-eaten story with which every unsuccessful gambler seeks to establish an alibi.