I didn't like the scheme itself any too well, neither. Not any way you could look at it. In the first place it seemed like a mean trick on the niggers. Then I didn't much believe we could get away with it.
The more I looked him over the more I seen Doctor Kirby had changed considerable. When I first knowed him he liked to hear himself talking and he liked to live free and easy and he liked to be running around the country and all them things, more'n he liked to be making money. Of course, he wanted it; but that wasn't the ONLY thing he was into the Sagraw game fur. If he had money, he was free with it and would help most any one out of a hole. But he wasn't thinking it and talking it all the time then.
But now he was thinking money and dream-ing money and talking of nothing but how to get it. And planning to make it out of skinning them niggers. He didn't care a dern how he worked on their feelings to get it. He didn't even seem to care whether he killed Sam trying them drugs onto him. He wanted MONEY, and he wanted it so bad he was ready and willing to take up with most any wild scheme to make it.
They was something about him now that didn't fit in much with the Doctor Kirby I had knowed.
It seemed like he had spells when he saw himself how he had changed. He wasn't gay and joking all the time like he had been before, neither. Iguess the doctor was getting along toward fifty years old. I suppose he thought if he was ever going to get anything out of his gift of the gab he better settle down to something, and quit fooling around, and do it right away. But it looked to me like he might never turn the trick. Fur he was drinking right smart all the time. Drinking made him think a lot, and thinking was making him look old. He was more'n one year older than he had been a year ago.
He kept a quart bottle in his room now. The night after we had took Sam to see Doctor Jackson we was setting in his room, and he was hitting it purty hard.
"Danny," he says to me, after a while, like he was talking out loud to himself too, "what did you think of Doctor Jackson?""I don't like him much," I says.
"Nor I," he says, frowning, and takes a drink.
Then he says, after quite a few minutes of frowning and thinking, under his breath like: "He's a blame sight more decent than I am, for all of that.""Why?" I asts him.
"Because Doctor Jackson," he says, "hasn't the least idea that he ISN'T decent, and getting his money in a decent way. While at one time Iwas--"
He breaks off and don't say what he was. I asts him. "I was going to say a gentleman," he says, "but on reflection, I doubt if I was ever anything but a cheap imitation. I never heard a man say that he was a gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him. Also," he goes on, work-ing himself into a better humour again with the sound of his own voice, "if I HAD ever been a gentle-man at any time, enough of it would surely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man who cheats niggers."He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around the country couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if he had ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if you will, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still.
I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time it happens to be out loud.
"What is a gentleman?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might take his mind off himself a little to tell me. "What MAKES one?""Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair, and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. "I heard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day."Well, speaking personal, I never had smelled none of roses. I wasn't nothing but trash myself, so being a gentleman didn't bother me one way or the other. The only reason I didn't want to see them niggers bunked so very bad was only jest because it was such a low-down, ornery kind of trick.
