That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno
how, nor why.
"I've tried nearly everything but blackmail,"
he says, "and I'll probably be trying that by this
time next year, if this scheme fails. But there's
something about their being niggers that makes
me sick of this thing already--just as the time
has come to make the start. And I don't know
WHY it should, either." He slipped another big
slug of whiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me:
"Do you know what's the matter with me?"
I asts him what.
"I'm too decent to be a crook," he says, "and
too crooked to be decent. You've got to be one
thing or the other steady to make it pay."
Then he says:
"Did you ever hear of the descent to Avernus,
Danny?"
"I might," I tells him, "and then agin I mightn't,
but if I ever did, I don't remember what she is.
What is she?"
"It's the chute to the infernal regions," he says.
"They say it's greased. But it isn't. It's really
no easier sliding down than it is climbing
back."
Well, I seen this nigger scheme of our'n wasn't
the only thing that was troubling Doctor Kirby
that night. It was thinking of all the schemes
like it in the years past he had went into, and how
he had went into 'em light-hearted and more'n
half fur fun when he was a young man, and now he
wasn't fitten fur nothing else but them kind of
schemes, and he knowed it.
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