NOW ONE evening toward the end of my illness I lay on my bedroll watching the crew, and I saw that the head tracker, who had told me that first evening in Yellow Cat Gorge of his scorn for money and belongings and of his hoarding nothing but friendship, was after all able to be greedy just like other men.

We were spar-moored against some big rocks in an eddy between ports. A number of the trackers settled down to a gambling game of jumping sticks, which the head tracker was not obliged, or threatened, or even cajoled to join, but to which he nevertheless did drift, wearing, at first, an indifferent look. On watching his face, however, I began to see in it an alertness to the gaming that later turned into a frantic hungry stare at each man’s turn and the exchange of coppers that followed. Finally, squatting on his hams and demanding a turn himself, he took the bamboo receptacle which held the stiff bundle of marked chopsticks from his neighbor, and he jounced the container and rattled the sticks in his own eccentric, jerky rhythms, behaving as if he had in his hands some remarkable talisman, some mysterious cylinder of fate; his eyes were those of a cat. He consistently won. When the others threw their coppers on the planks before him, he reached down with his hard hands, flicked up the coins with one of his long fingernails, palmed them, sounded them one against another occasionally to make sure that this one or that one was not a dross counterfeit, and then dropped them with ceremonious satisfaction into the cloth purse that like a precious scrotum dangled between his thighs on a drawstring from his waistband. It was a disgusting spectacle of rapacity. Now and then he hummed in a thin high whine a passage from one of the trackers’ songs that only he could sing, as if to assert, by a mere hint, his habitual dominance over these other men of burden, and I could see their growing resentment, not of his winning, for there must always have been a winner before whose feet the congenital losers would be compelled to lay down their entire tangible worth, but rather of his too evident greed, his hypnotic plundering of their coppers. The game broke up in an argument, after two or three of the men hysterically accused him of having cheated. At this the head tracker, showing a sudden contempt for the coins that meant so much to the gamblers and until that moment had seemed so important to him, stood up still cursing the other men, stepped to the rail, unslung the purse from the blue cotton cinch of his trousers, opened its throat, and, pinching the bottom of the little loaded bag, disdainfully dropped all the money into the whispering river.