Black Jack

Terry left the hotel more gloomy than he had been even when he departed from the ranch that morning.  The certainty of Denver that he would find it impossible to stay by his program of honest work had made a strong impression upon his imaginative mind, as though the little safecracker really had the power to look into the future and into the minds of men.  Where he should look for work next, he had no idea.  And he balanced between a desire to stay near the town and work out his destiny there, or else drift far away.  Distance, however, seemed to have no barrier against rumor.  After two days of hard riding, he had placed a broad gap between himself and the Cornish ranch, yet in a short time rumor had overtaken him, casually, inevitably, and the force of his name was strong enough to take away his job.

Standing in the middle of the street he looked darkly over the squat roofs of the town to the ragged mountains that marched away against the horizon—­a bleak outlook.  Which way should he ride?

A loud outburst of curses roared behind him, a whip snapped above him, he stepped aside and barely from under the feet of the leaders as a long team wound by with the freight wagon creaking and swaying and rumbling behind it.  The driver leaned from his seat in passing and volleyed a few crackling remarks in the very ear of Terry.  It was strange that he did not resent it.  Ordinarily he would have wanted to, climb onto that seat and roll the driver down in the dust, but today he lacked ambition.  Pain numbed him, a peculiar mental pain.  And, with the world free before him to roam in, he felt imprisoned.

He turned.  Someone was laughing at him from the veranda of the hotel and pointing him out to another, who laughed raucously in turn.  Terry knew what was in their minds.  A man who allowed himself to be cursed by a passing teamster was not worthy of the gun strapped at his thigh.  He watched their faces as through a cloud, turned again, saw the door of the gambling hall open to allow someone to come out, and was invited by the cool, dim interior.  He crossed the street and passed through the door.

He was glad, instantly.  Inside there was a blanket of silence; beyond the window the sun was a white rain of heat, blinding and appalling.  But inside his shoes took hold on a floor moist from a recent scrubbing and soft with the wear of rough boots; and all was dim, quiet, hushed.

There was not a great deal of business in the place, naturally, at this hour of the day.  And the room seemed so large, the tables were so numerous, that Terry wondered how so small a town could support it.  Then he remembered the mine and everything was explained.  People who dug gold like dirt spent it in the same spirit.  Half a dozen men were here and there, playing in what seemed a listless manner, save when you looked close.

Terry slumped into a big chair in the darkest corner and relaxed until the coolness had worked through his skin and into his blood.  Presently he looked about him to find something to do, and his eye dropped naturally on the first thing that made a noise—­roulette.  For a moment he watched the spinning disk.  The man behind the table on his high stool was whirling the thing for his own amusement, it seemed.  Terry walked over and looked on.

He hardly knew the game.  But he was fascinated by the motions of the ball; one was never able to tell where it would stop, on one of the thirty-six numbers, on the red or on the black, on the odd or the even.  He visualized a frantic, silent crowd around the wheel listening to the click of the ball.

And now he noted that the wheel had stopped the last four times on the odd.  He jerked a five-dollar gold piece out of his pocket and placed it on the even.  The wheel spun, clicked to a stop, and the rake of the croupier slicked his five dollars away across the smooth-worn top of the table.

How very simple!  But certainly the wheel must stop on the even this time, having struck the odd five times in a row.  He placed ten dollars on the even.

He did not feel that it was gambling.  He had never gambled in his life, for Elizabeth Cornish had raised him to look on gambling not as a sin, but as a crowning folly.  However, this was surely not gambling.  There was no temptation.  Not a word had been spoken to him since he entered the place.  There was no excitement, no music, none of the drink and song of which he had heard so much in robbing men of their cooler senses.  It was only his little system that tempted him on.

He did not know that all gambling really begins with the creation of a system that will beat the game.  And when a man follows a system, he is started on the most cold-blooded gambling in the world.

Again the disk stopped, and the ball clicked softly and the ten dollars slid away behind the rake of the man on the stool.  This would never do!  Fifteen dollars gone out of a total capital of fifty!  He doubled with some trepidation again.  Thirty dollars wagered.  The wheel spun—­the money disappeared under the rake.

Terry felt like setting his teeth.  Instead, he smiled.  He drew out his last five dollars and wagered it with a coldness that seemed to make sure of loss, on a single number.  The wheel spun, clicked; he did not even watch, and was turning away when a sound of a little musical shower of gold attracted him.  Gold was being piled before him.  Five times thirty-six made one hundred and eighty dollars he had won!  He came back to the table, scooped up his winnings carelessly and bent a kinder eye upon the wheel.  He felt that there was a sort of friendly entente between them.

It was time to go now, however.  He sauntered to the door with a guilty chill in the small of his back, half expecting reproaches to be shouted after him for leaving the game when he was so far ahead of it.  But apparently the machine which won without remorse lost without complaint.

At the door he made half a pace into the white heat of the sunlight.  Then he paused, a cool edging of shadow falling across one shoulder while the heat burned through the shirt of the other.  Why go on?

Across the street the man on the veranda of the hotel began laughing again and pointing him out.  Terry himself looked the fellow over in an odd fashion, not with anger or with irritation, but with a sort of cold calculation.  The fellow was trim enough in the legs.  But his shoulders were fat from lack of work, and the bulge of flesh around the armpits would probably make him slow in drawing a gun.

He shrugged his own lithe shoulders in contempt and turned.  The man on the stool behind the roulette wheel was yawning until his jaw muscles stood out in hard, pointed ridges, and his cheeks fell in ridiculously.  Terry went back.  He was not eager to win; but the gleam of colors on the wheel fascinated him.  He placed five dollars, saw the wheel win, took in his winnings without emotion.

While he scooped the two coins up, he did not see the croupier turn his head and shoot a single glance to a fat, squat man in the corner of the room, a glance to which the fat man responded with the slightest of nods and smiles.  He was the owner.  And he was not particularly happy at the thought of some hundred and fifty dollars being taken out of his treasury by some chance stranger.

Terry did not see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together.  He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun.  The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm pool of gold, but he gave the sun at his feet no more than a casual glance.  It was metallic gold that he was fascinated by and the whims and fancies of that singular wheel.  Twice that afternoon his fortune had mounted above three thousand dollars—­once it mounted to an even six thousand.  He had stopped to count his winnings at this point, and on the verge of leaving decided to make it an even ten thousand before he went away.  And five minutes later he was gambling with five hundred in his wallet.

When the sunlight grew yellow, other men began to enter the room.  Terry was still at his post.  He did not see them.  There was no human face in the world for him except the colorless face of the croupier, and the long, pale eyelashes that lifted now and then over greenish-orange eyes.  And Terry did not heed when he was shouldered by the growing crowd around the wheel.

He only knew that other bets were being placed and that it was a nuisance, for the croupier took much longer in paying debts and collecting winnings, so that the wheel spun less often.

Meantime he was by no means unnoticed.  A little whisper had gone the rounds that a real plunger was in town.  And when men came into the hall, their attention was directed automatically by the turn of other eyes toward six feet of muscular manhood, heavy-shouldered and erect, with a flare of a red silk bandanna around his throat and a heavy sombrero worn tilted a little to one side and back on his head.

“He’s playing a system,” said someone.  “Been standing there all afternoon and making poor Pedro—­the thief!—­sweat and shake in his boots.”

In fact, the owner of the place had lost his complacence and his smile together.  He approached near to the wheel and watched its spin with a face turned sallow and flat of cheek from anxiety.  For with the setting of the sun it seemed that luck flooded upon Terry Hollis.  He began to bet in chunks of five hundred, alternating between the red and the odd, and winning with startling regularity.  His winnings were now shoved into an awkward canvas bag.  Twenty thousand dollars!  That had grown from the fifty.

No wonder the crowd had two looks for Terry.  His face had lost its color and grown marvellously expressionless.

“The real gambler’s look,” they said.

His mouth was pinched at the corners, and otherwise his expression never varied.

Once he turned.  A broad-faced man, laughing and obviously too self-contented to see what he was doing, trod heavily on the toes of Terry, stepping past the latter to get his winnings.  He was caught by the shoulder and whirled around.  The crowd saw the tall man draw his right foot back, balance, lift a trifle on his toes, and then a balled fist shot up, caught the broad-faced man under the chin and dumped him in a crumpled heap half a dozen feet away.  They picked him up and took him away, a stunned wreck.  Terry had turned back to his game, and in ten seconds had forgotten what he had done.

But the crowd remembered, and particularly he who had twice laughed at Terry from the veranda of the hotel.

The heap in the canvas sack diminished, shrank—­he dumped the remainder of the contents into his pocket.  He had been betting in solid lumps of a thousand for the past twenty minutes, and the crowd watched in amazement.  This was drunken gambling, but the fellow was obviously sober.  Then a hand touched the shoulder of Terry.

“Just a minute, partner.”

He looked into the face of a big man, as tall as he and far heavier of build:  a magnificent big head, heavily marked features, a short-cropped black beard that gave him dignity.  A middle-aged man, about forty-five, and still in the prime of life.

“Lemme pass a few words with you.”

Terry drew back to the side.