All you know about it for certain is that it’s bound to change. ''Luck,' continued the gambler, reflectively, 'is a mighty queer thing.
Ultimately, Oakhurst's suicide poses a question about about strength and weakness as it relates to fate and chance. Perhaps, the narrator suggests, Oakhurst was dead long before he took his own life, as he looks as stoic in death as he did while alive. In taking his own life, Oakhurst at once bravely resigns himself to his luck running out, and, in a perhaps cowardly fashion, evades the pain of a prolonged natural demise. This is the narrator's final word on John Oakhurst, wherein the narrator plays with the idea that although Oakhurst is often represented as the stoic, macho presence in the group, he was simultaneously its weakest member.
And pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.
