“Everybody,” repeated the dentist.  “There’s—­there’s some beer.”

“We’ll celebrate, by damn!” exclaimed Marcus.  “It ain’t every day you win five thousand dollars.  It’s only Sundays and legal holidays.”  Again he set the company off into a gale of laughter.  Anything was funny at a time like this.  In some way every one of them felt elated.  The wheel of fortune had come spinning close to them.  They were near to this great sum of money.  It was as though they too had won.

“Here’s right where I sat when I bought that ticket,” cried Trina, after they had come into the “Parlors,” and Marcus had lit the gas.  “Right here in this chair.”  She sat down in one of the rigid chairs under the steel engraving.  “And, Marcus, you sat here——­”

“And I was just getting out of the operating chair,” interposed Miss Baker.

“Yes, yes.  That’s so; and you,” continued Trina, pointing to Maria, “came up and said, ‘Buy a ticket in the lottery; just a dollar.’  Oh, I remember it just as plain as though it was yesterday, and I wasn’t going to at first——­”

“And don’t you know I told Maria it was against the law?”

“Yes, I remember, and then I gave her a dollar and put the ticket in my pocketbook.  It’s in my pocketbook now at home in the top drawer of my bureau—­oh, suppose it should be stolen now,” she suddenly exclaimed.

“It’s worth big money now,” asserted Marcus.

“Five thousand dollars.  Who would have thought it?  It’s wonderful.”  Everybody started and turned.  It was McTeague.  He stood in the middle of the floor, wagging his huge head.  He seemed to have just realized what had happened.

“Yes, sir, five thousand dollars!” exclaimed Marcus, with a sudden unaccountable mirthlessness.  “Five thousand dollars!  Do you get on to that?  Cousin Trina and you will be rich people.”

“At six per cent, that’s twenty-five dollars a month,” hazarded the agent.

“Think of it.  Think of it,” muttered McTeague.  He went aimlessly about the room, his eyes wide, his enormous hands dangling.

“A cousin of mine won forty dollars once,” observed Miss Baker.  “But he spent every cent of it buying more tickets, and never won anything.”

Then the reminiscences began.  Maria told about the butcher on the next block who had won twenty dollars the last drawing.  Mrs. Sieppe knew a gasfitter in Oakland who had won several times; once a hundred dollars.  Little Miss Baker announced that she had always believed that lotteries were wrong; but, just the same, five thousand was five thousand.

“It’s all right when you win, ain’t it, Miss Baker?” observed Marcus, with a certain sarcasm.  What was the matter with Marcus?  At moments he seemed singularly out of temper.