“See here, my good fellow; I’m told that you’ve been going out of your way and meddling with the policy-dealers.  Take my advice, and mind your own business.  If you don’t. it will be all day with you.  There isn’t a man in town strong enough to fight this thing, so you’d better let it alone.”

And he did let it alone.  He had a wife and three little children, and couldn’t afford to lose his place.  So he minded his own business, and let it alone.

Pinky and her friend entered this small third-story back room.  Behind a narrow, unpainted counter, having a desk at one end, stood a middle-aged man, with dark, restless eyes that rarely looked you in the face.  He wore a thick but rather closely-cut beard and moustache.  The police knew him very well; so did the criminal lawyers, when he happened to come in their way; so did the officials of two or three State prisons in which he had served out partial sentences.  He was too valuable to political “rings” and associations antagonistic to moral and social well-being to be left idle in the cell of a penitentiary for the whole term of a commitment.  Politicians have great influence, and governors are human.

On the walls of the room were pasted a few pictures cut from the illustrated papers, some of them portraits of leading politicians, and some of them portraits of noted pugilists and sporting-men.  The picture of a certain judge, who had made himself obnoxious to the fraternity of criminals by his severe sentences, was turned upside down.  There was neither table nor chair in the room.

The woman in black had passed in just before the girls, and was waiting her turn to examine the drawn numbers.  She had not tasted food since the day before, having ventured her only dime on a policy, and was feeling strangely faint and bewildered.  She did not have to wait long.  It was the old story.  Her combination had not come out, and she was starving.  As she moved back toward the door she staggered a little.  Pinky, who had become curious about her, noticed this, and watched her as she went out.

“It’s about up with the old lady, I guess,” she said to her companion, with an unfeeling laugh.

And she was right.  On the next morning the poor old woman was found dead in her room, and those who prepared her for burial said that she was wasted to a skeleton.  She had, in fact, starved herself in her infatuation, spending day after day in policies what she should have spent for food.  Pinky’s strange remark was but too true.  She had become a policy-drunkard—­a vice almost as disastrous in its effects as its kindred, vice, intemperance, though less brutalizing and less openly indulged.

“Where now?” was the question of Pinky’s friend as they came down, after spending in policies all the money they had received from the sale of Flora Bond’s clothing.  “Any other game?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Come along to my room, and I’ll tell you.”