Although it was broad daylight, the room in which the operations took place was shuttered and had the blinds drawn. A three-light gaselier beat down on a big table in the centre of the room, round three sides of which were ranged a dozen or fifteen men eagerly intent on the operations of the banker. A heavy-jowled man with overhanging black eyebrows, he was seated in a half-circle cut into the centre of one side of the table. In front of him was a bright steel box sufficiently large to contain a pack of cards with the face of the top card discernible at an opening at the top. The cards were pressed upwards in the box by springs, and at the side a narrow opening allowed the operator to push the cards out one at a time, thus disclosing the faces of those underneath and deciding the bets. On each side of the box were the discarded winning and losing cards, and on the dealer's left a
tray which served the purpose of a till in receiving or paying out money. A cloth with painted representations of the thirteen cards of a suit was pinned to the table nearest to the players, and they placed stakes on the cards they fancied would next be disclosed. Twice the box would click out cards amid a dead silence. Those who had staked out money on the first card disclosed won, those who had staked on the second lost.
There was often dead silence while the turn was being made, save for the click of a marker shown on the wall and guarded by a thick-set little man with red hair, fierce eyes, and an enormous chest. But directly afterwards babel would break out, to be sternly quelled by the heavy-jowled man.
"I 'ad set on sa nine," ... "Say, that king was coppered," ... "I ought ter have split it."
The jargons of all the world met and crossed at such time. It was rarely that there arose a serious quarrel, for Keller and his myrmidons had a swift way of dealing with malcontents. When a man became troublesome, the fierce-eyed little marker with the big chest would tap him on the shoulder.
"That's enough, you," he would say menacingly.
If the warning were not sufficient the left hand of the little man would drop to his jacket pocket, and when it emerged it would be decorated with a heavy brass knuckle-duster. It took but one blow to make a man lose all interest in the game, and thereafter he would be handed over to the tender mercies of "Jim," a giant of a door-keeper, who after dark would drop him into the street at some convenient moment, with
a savage warning to keep his mouth shut lest a worse thing befall him.
This was the place Heldon Foyle had made up his mind to enter single-handed—a place in which the precautions against surprise were so complete that every article which could be identified as a gambling implement was made of material which could be readily burnt, or soluble at a temperature lower than that of boiling water. A big saucepan was continually simmering on the fire, so that the implements could be dropped in it at a second's notice.
But Heldon Foyle had hopes. At the worst he could only fail. He returned to Scotland Yard and shut himself up for twenty minutes in the make-up room. When he reached Smike Street again he was no longer the spruce, upright, well-dressed official. A grimy cap covered tousled hair. His face was strained, his eyes bloodshot and his moustache combed out raggedly. A set of greasy mechanic's overalls had been drawn over his own clothes. He walked uncertainly.