Secretly, Thode was beginning to think that he should. The girl was an anomaly and he was curious to see what manner of man her idol was and learn how he had kept her so singularly free from the dross of his world and managed to hold so unswervingly before her the real stakes of the game, truth and honor and a high heart.
When he left her at the side door of the Blue Chip, the young engineer held her hand for an appreciable moment longer than the occasion demanded.
"I'm coming to-night," he announced. "Will you—will I see you?"
"In the patio," she dimpled swiftly. "Buena suerte!"
"Good luck!" The phrase echoed in his brain, but oddly enough his thoughts did not go forward to the hot, crowded, smoke-hung card-room, or the girl waiting in the cool, fragrant darkness of the inner court, but instead there arose before his mental eyes the vision of a petrified wooden cross beside a glassy pool, and mingled incongruously with it, the face of Starr Wiley, distorted as he had last seen it, with the bruised lips twisted into a mocking leer. Would the lightly expressed wish of Gentleman Geoff's Billie prove a presage of victory in the great game they two were playing?
CHAPTER III
THE COMING OF EL NEGRITO
When he entered the Blue Chip that night, Thode found play already in full blast. The tables were crowded, smoke hung in low-banked clouds below the flaring oil lamps, and the glittering bar at the far end of the room was phalanxed three deep by a jostling, good-natured throng. Soft-footed, wooden-faced Chinese mozos glided about, and the whining monotone of the croupier came from a distant corner.
The scene was not an unfamiliar one to the young engineer, but he glanced about him with quickened interest. The walls of the huge room, like the exterior, were painted a garish blue, the floor bare but scrubbed clean, and the chairs and tables had been obviously selected with a view to utility and strength rather than ornamentation. No attempt had been made to render the place attractive and in this Gentleman Geoff's psychology was sound; Limasito wanted its play, like its liquor, without frills.