Nothing made much difference to him now.
Nevertheless, Vandover was evicted from the Lick House three days after
he had stolen young Haight's money. Instead of paying his bills with the
amount, he gambled it away in a back room of a new cafe on Market Street
with Toby, the red-eyed waiter from the Imperial, and a certain German
"professor," a billiard marker, who wore a waistcoat figured with little
designs of the Eiffel Tower, and who was a third owner in a trotting
mare named Tomato Ketchup.
Vandover was now left with only his bonds, his U.S. 4 per cents. These
brought him in but sixty-nine dollars a quarter, or as he had had it
arranged, twenty-three dollars a month. Just at this time, as if by a
miracle, a veritable God from the Machine, Vandover's lawyer, Mr. Field,
found him an opportunity to earn some money. For the first and only time
in his life Vandover knew what it was to work for a living. The work
that Field secured for him was the work of painting those little
pictures on the lacquered surface of iron safes, those little oval
landscapes between the lines of red and gold lettering--landscapes,
rugged gorges, ocean steamships under all sail, mountain lakes with
sailboats careening upon their surfaces, the boat indicated by two
little triangular dabs of Chinese white, one for the sail itself and the
other for its reflection in the water.
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