For six hands running Dexter won, and the chamois belt was beginning to take on a limp and depleted appearance when his luck finally turned against him. He lost three pots, gained one, forfeited four more, and at length was reduced to his original stake.
"Let 'em go!" said the outlaw in unlovely gloating as he leaned his broad elbows over the heap of gold he had raked back to his side of the table.
Alison glanced sidewise at the corporal, and he thought he saw a tinge of anxiety in her glowing eyes. "If you please," he invited serenely.
She riffled the pack, and slowly and deliberately passed out the cards. Then she straightened on her stool and waited without breathing while the two players consulted fortune's sending.
"Jacks up," asserted the officer after the draw, as he spread his cards fan-shape under the flickering lantern rays.
"Beats tens and sixes," admitted Crill, gulping in his fleshy throat.
Dexter took the next pot and the next, was beaten twice, and then started on a winning streak that eventually stripped the outlaw of his last gold piece. But when the yellow treasury notes were forced out on the table, the break came, and the corporal's three thousand of winnings dribbled gradually away until he had nothing left to stake but his pledged word to free his prisoner if the next turn of the game fell against him.
But the hazard of the last chance switched in his favor. He piled up his winnings to formidable proportions once more, again dropped back to nothing but a promise, and again started accumulating gold pieces. So the game went on through the hushed hours of the night, see-sawing first one direction and then the other, with neither player gaining a final advantage, until along towards the approach of daylight, when the luck of the game swung definitely to Dexter's side of the table, and thereafter remained with him.
The first glimmering of dawn found the three strangely assembled companions still seated in a tense circle under a dim, sputtering lantern, watching the fall of cards on the greasy table top. The corporal had unbuttoned his tunic at the throat, and he had slumped down on his stool, his legs stretched at full length, and his lean jaw resting on his hand. His face looked gaunt and haggard in the yellow light, but his wide-open eyes were keen and watchful, glinting with feverish brightness. All desire to sleep had left him. On the table at his elbow was stacked three thousand dollars in gold coin, and a bundle of crisp treasury notes representing thirteen thousand more. Crill was down to his last bill.
The murderer's face was not pleasant to look upon. His thick, bloodless lips had drawn apart, baring his teeth in a poisonous misshapen smile. The flat nostrils were pinched in at the corners by muscular constriction, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, and the skin seemed to have stretched tighter across his bloated face, accentuating the white, bony hollows of the temples. The eyes that looked out between puckered rolls of flesh gleamed with ominous fixity, like hard black beads, never winking, never losing the malevolence and hatred that dwelt in their frozen depths.