CHAPTER XIII
"Why don't you go outside?" I asked of the Jam-wagon.
I had rescued him from one of his periodical plunges into the cesspool of debauch, and he was peaked, pallid, penitent. Listlessly he stared at me a long moment, the dull, hollow-eyed stare of the recently regenerate.
" Well," he said at last, " I think I stay for the same reason many another man stays—pride. I feel that the Yukon owes me one of two things, a stake or a grave—and she's going to pay."
" Seems to me, the way you're shaping you're more liable to get the latter."
« Yes—well, that'll be all right."
" Look here," I remonstrated, " don't be a rotter. You're a man, a splendid one. You might do anything, be anything. For Heaven's sake stop slipping cogs, and get into the game."
His thin, handsome face hardened bitterly.
" I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm not fit to play the game; sometimes I wonder if it's all worth while; sometimes I'm half inclined to end it."
"Oh, don't talk nonsense."
" I'm not; I mean it, every word. I don't often speak of myself. It doesn't matter who I am, or what I've been.   I've gone through a lot—more than
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