CHAPTER XXXVI

THE GAMBLER’S TRAP.

There were others in New Haven as well as the Yale athletes who had been obliged to return. Foote, the associate of Parker in the attempt to prevent Yale from winning the big series with Harvard, was one of them.

Foote had neglected his work sadly in the last term. And now his father, who would otherwise have shown leniency toward such an offense, had told him that unless, by hard work in the summer, with attendance at the Yale summer school to help him, he conformed to all his conditions, he would have to go to work, and shift for himself in the fall.

“I’ve made a mistake with you, my boy,” his father had said to him. “I supposed you were old enough to be allowed a certain liberty, and I find that you’ve been abusing it. I realize that it’s partly my own fault. You’ve had too much liberty and too much money to spend.

“That’s going to stop. I’ll give you a chance to mend your ways and make good from now on; but there must be no skulking and no more crooked work. You’re young yet, and you can live down the mistakes you’ve made. But you’ve got to settle down and help yourself; for, if you don’t, neither I nor any one else can do it for you.”

Foote took his father’s kindly warning in the wrong spirit, as he had the efforts of Jim Phillips and Dick Merriwell to set him on the right path after his outrageous treatment of them. He felt that he was misunderstood and abused, and his mother, a weak and foolish woman, simply helped to keep him in the wrong path. She thought, as mothers will, that her son was about the best son on earth, and she was sure that if he had made mistakes it was because he had been led astray. Finding her arguments of no avail with her husband, she had made the grave mistake of sympathizing with her boy, and of supplying him, in secret, with the money which no longer flowed like water from his father.

Parker, who had frankly and with a certain degree of manliness, admitted his fault and made such amends for it as he could, thus winning full forgiveness from both Dick and Jim, had tried to reason with his former ally.

“There’s no use, Paul, old chap,” he said. “We were wrong, and I can see that now. I didn’t know what you were doing about that freight car, or I wouldn’t have stood for it, but I didn’t make any effort to get out of it on that score. I admitted that I was just as much to blame as you were, and I straightened myself out with Merriwell and Phillips.

“Why don’t you go to them and start a new deal? You’ll find them willing to forget the past, and they’re better people than the ones we’ve been running with. That’s a rotten crowd—that gambling, drinking set. They don’t stand by you when you’re in trouble.”

“You can quit and be good if you want to,” said Foote, sneering. “As for me, when I start something, I see it through, if there’s any way that it can be done. Those fellows have won the first deal. But there’s more coming, and I guess I’ll land on top before I’m through. Then they’ll be sorry they ever got themselves into my bad books.”

Parker gave him up as hopeless after that.

On the very same night as that on which Dick Merriwell and his friends arranged the details of the team that was to play against Boston, Foote left his rooms and went to a gambling house in New Haven, whose owner had grown rich on the money he had made by plucking foolish Yale men, who had more money than was good for them. Foote had played roulette there more than once, and he had been allowed to win just often enough to encourage him to keep on in the hope of making a big killing some day. There he had spent and thrown away money given to him for the payment of his college bills for clothes and books.

Despite his generous allowance, he was always in debt, and his father, although his eyes had been opened by the story of the exploit with the freight car, had no suspicion of the way his boy had been squandering his money. Now that there had been a partial exposure, Foote lived in constant fear that his creditors, by appealing to his father for payment, would reveal what he had managed thus far to keep hidden; and, having some money that his mother had sent him, he decided to try to double the sum at least, instead of using it to appease the most insistent of his creditors: his tailor and his shoemaker.

It wasn’t much of a place that Foote went to. Many people who have never seen the inside of a gambling house think that they are veritable palaces, but that is not often so. There may have been a few such places, years ago, at Saratoga, at Long Branch, and even in New York. At Monte Carlo, and a few other protected and legalized gambling places in Europe, the fittings are very luxurious. But it is not so in this country, as a rule.

In this house, in the business part of New Haven, cunningly arranged so that any one passing in the street would have been far from suspecting its nature, Foote was ushered—after passing the rigid inspection of the man at the door—into a large room, the air of which was heavy with stale smoke.

At one end were three tables arranged for roulette, with a tired, heavy-eyed man idly twirling the balls around at one of them. The season was practically over, with the ending of the college year, and soon the gamblers would flit to other parts, where new victims were to be found. In another part of the room was a buffet, with a few bottles of whisky, and some unappetizing sandwiches. Some pictures of stage favorites were on the walls, and that represented the whole effort to make the place luxurious and attractive. Only foolish boys like Foote, without the sense to penetrate the sham and pretense of the place, could be deceived by such methods.

A short, dark man, with a bulldog jaw and a pair of watery eyes, stepped forward to greet Foote when he appeared in the gambling room.

“How are you, Mr. Foote?” he said, with little attempt to be pleasant. Foote had been plucked for about all he was worth, and Marsten, the gambler, knew that very well. It was his business to make no mistakes in such matters. And, according to his lights, he was a good business man. “I hear you’ve been getting into trouble,” he continued. “Bucking up against the pride of the Y. M. C. A.—Mr. Merriwell?”

The gamblers who infested New Haven hated Dick Merriwell because they knew that his influence among Yale men was all against their trade. Dick had driven Harding, one of their number, from his profitable pastime of fleecing Yale men at poker, and they knew that, so long as he was in control of Yale athletics and the most popular man about the college, their activities would be limited. They had always managed to come out ahead in their struggles with the Yale faculty, but Dick Merriwell had proved a far more dangerous opponent.

Foote was surprised and alarmed at the knowledge of his affairs the gambler showed. He had supposed his trouble with Merriwell a closely guarded secret.

“How did you hear about that?” he flamed out. “You know too much, it seems to me!”

“There’s precious little you boys do that doesn’t reach me sooner or later,” said Marsten, with an evil grin. “If you’d come to me and got some advice, I might have been able to help you out so that you wouldn’t have got caught. Now, you see, you’re in bad yourself, and you haven’t hurt the man you went after. That’s a poor way to do. You took too many chances.”

“Well, never mind that,” said Foote. “I came here to take some of your money away with me. Start the little ball rolling.”

“Hold on a bit,” said Marsten. “I’ve got a lot of your paper now, my buck, and I’d like to see some of your cash before I go in any deeper.”

“You’ve seen all I’ve had since Easter,” said Foote bitterly. “However, I’ve got two hundred and fifty here to play with to-night. Will that satisfy you?”

“Right-o!” said Marsten. “Hand it over, and you can go up to four hundred to-night on the strength of it. If you use up this little wad, you can sign a note for the rest.”

Foote played cautiously at first, and won a little. Then he lost, and, playing more recklessly, soon struck a losing vein that he could not seem to escape. Had he been as wise as he thought himself, he would have known that he did not have a chance; that a wire was concealed in the table leg, and that the man behind the wheel, by touching various buttons beneath his feet, which were hidden by the carpet, could make the ball fall so that he could not win.

The last of his money and his extended credit was exhausted before midnight. And, plead as he would, Marsten would not let him play any more on credit. He had thought to mend his fortune; he was, instead, deeper in debt than ever.

“See here,” said Marsten brutally, “I can’t wait any longer for my money. Either you pay me up within a week or I go to your father with your notes. You can’t defend against them on the ground that they’re for gambling debts. You fixed that when you signed them.”

Foote was terror-stricken.

“I can’t get the money,” he pleaded. “If you give me time, you’ll be paid. You’ll ruin me if you go to my father. And he’ll fight to the end before he pays them.”

“He’ll pay them, all right,” said Marsten grimly. “He won’t want all this in the papers. And as to its ruining you, you ought to have thought of that before you ran into debt. That’s not my lookout, you know.”

“You said you’d never use them that way,” said Foote. “You told me that signing the papers was only a matter of form.”

“That’s when I thought you were square and meant to pay if you lost,” said the gambler mercilessly. “I’ve given you plenty of time. There aren’t many would have treated you as well. You’d better get ready to pay up, for I shan’t change my mind. You’re a piker—a bum sport. I hate your kind.”

“Here, go easy on the kid, Bunny,” said a new voice, that of a man, who, sitting in a darkened part of the room, had not been noticed before by Foote. “I like his looks. He looks as if he had plenty of nerve. Why not give him a chance?”

Marsten spun around and faced the speaker.

“Go ahead,” he said. “If you think so well of him, talk to him. If you want to guarantee his notes, I’ll hold off a while longer.”

“This is Mr. Barrows,” Marsten said then to Foote, by way of introduction. “You’re in luck if he’s taken a shine to you. He can pull you out, if any one can. You’d better see what he wants.”

Foote was too relieved at the sign of a chance for escape to think of how obviously prearranged the whole scene was.

“Are you game to go in with me on a big deal, kid?” asked Barrows. “If you help me to pull it off, I’ll pay up your notes here and give you five hundred beside. How does that strike you?”

“I’ll do anything,” said Foote. “I can’t let my father hear of this. He’d turn me off without a cent. I know he would. He’s down on me already, and this would be the last straw. I’m game for anything you want me to do.”