'What you do, señor?' asked the Mexican. Longstreet withdrew his eyes from Barbee and gave his attention to his antagonist, a half-bred Mexican of low-grade mentality who was offering a duel of wits! He bet the requisite four dollars.
And now from Barbee's fingers came the last cards, one for Longstreet and one for Chavez. Longstreet drew a queen and went into the silence of deep meditation; to Chavez came a lowly seven. Longstreet needed no prompting that it was time to bet; further he understood that this was the last round, the final opportunity. He did not wait for the customary raise of Chavez, but slipped five dollars into the pot and sat back, beaming.
Nor did the Mexican hesitate. He pushed out to the centre of the table with slow brown fingers two twenty-dollar gold pieces.
'You—you raise me?' asked Longstreet.
'Si, señor. Tirty-fife pesos mas.'
Longstreet curbed a desire to warn the man, to insist that he reconsider. But in the end he kept his own counsel and made his complementary bet of thirty-five dollars.
'Call you,' he said quite in his best form.
The Mexican extracted from the bottom of his cards the first one dealt him face down and flipped it over carelessly. It was a ten; he had three tens, and the professor's extremely handsome pairs of aces and kings were as nothing. The Mexican's brown fingers drew the winnings in toward him, Longstreet's fifty-one dollars among them. Longstreet stared at him and at Barbee and at the treacherous cards themselves in sheer bewilderment.
It was not that he was shocked at the loss of a rather large sum of money in his present circumstances; his brain did not focus on the point. He was trying to see in what his advance theories had miscarried. For certainly it had seemed extremely unlikely that Chavez would have had three tens. Why, there were only four tens in the deck of fifty-two, there were four men playing, there remained in the deck, untouched, thirty-two cards——
'Deal 'em up,' said Barbee. 'Your deal, old boy.'