The U. P. Trail by Zane Grey (ebook reader play store .TXT) 📕

“Allie, these men are all bad,” said Durade. “You must avoid them when my back’s turned. I cannot run my place without them, so I am compelled to endure much.”

Allie’s attendant came in with her supper and she went to her room.

Thus began Allie Lee’s life as an unwilling and innocent accomplice of Durade in his retrogression from the status of a gambler to that of a criminal. In California he had played the game, diamond cut diamond. But he had broken. His hope, spirit, luck, nerve were gone. The bottle and Benton had almost destroyed his skill at professional gambling.

The days passed swiftly. Every afternoon Durade introduced a new company to his private den. Few ever came twice. In this there was a grain of hope, for if all the men in Benton, or out on the road, could only pass through Durade’s hall, the time would come when she would meet Neale or Larry. She lived for that. She was constantly on the lookout for a man she could trust with her story. Honest-faced laborers were not wanting in the stream of visitors Durade ushered into her presence, but either they were drunk or obsessed by gambling, or she found no opportunity to make her appeal.

These afternoons grew to be hideous for Allie. She had been subjected to every possible attention, annoyance, indignity, and insult, outside of direct violence. She could only shut her eyes and ears and lips. Fresno found many opportunities to approach her, sometimes in Durade’s presence, the gambler being blind to all but the cards and gold. At such times Allie wished she was sightless and deaf and feelingless. But after she was safely in her room again she told herself nothing had happened. She was still the same as she had always been. And sleep obliterated quickly what she had suffered. Every day was one nearer to that fateful and approaching moment. And when that moment did come what would all this horror amount to? It would fade—be as nothing. She would not let words and eyes harm her. They were not tangible—they had no substance for her. They made her sick with rage and revolt at the moment, but they had no power, no taint, no endurance. They were evil passing winds.

As she saw Durade’s retrogression, so she saw the changes in all about him. His winnings were large and his strange passion for play increased with them. The free gold that enriched Fresno and Mull and Andy only augmented their native ferocity. There were also Durade’s other helpers—Black, his swarthy doorkeeper, a pallid fellow called Dayss, who always glanced behind him, and Grist, a short, lame, bullet-headed, silent man—all of them under the spell of the green cloth.

With Durade’s success had come the craze for bigger stakes, and these could only be played for with other gamblers. So the black-frocked, cold-faced sharps became frequent visitors at Durade’s. Jones, the professional, won on that second visit—a fatal winning for him. Allie saw the giant Fresno suddenly fling himself upon Jones and bear him to the floor. Then Allie fled to her room. But she heard curses—a shot—a groan—Durade’s loud voice proclaiming that the gambler had cheated—and then the scraping of a heavy body being dragged out.

This murder horrified Allie, yet sharpened her senses. Providence had protected her. Durade had grown rich—wild—vain—mad to pit himself against the coolest and most skilful gamblers in Benton—and therefore his end was imminent. Allie lay in the dark, listening to Benton’s strange wailing roar, sad, yet hideous, and out of what she had seen and heard, and from the mournful message on the night wind, she realized how closely associated were gold and evil and men, and how inevitably they must lead to lawlessness and to bloodshed and to death.