Brent's luck held until the night before Thanksgiving, then the inevitable happened—he began to lose. At the roulette wheel and the faro table he lost twenty-five thousand dollars, and later, in a
game of stud, he dropped one hundred thousand more. The loss did not worry him any, he drank a little more than usual during the play, and his plunges came a little more frequently, but the cards were not falling his way, and when they did fall, he almost invariably ran them up against a stronger hand.
Rumor that the luck of Ace-In-The-Hole had changed at last spread rapidly through the camp, and late in the afternoon of Thanksgiving day, when the play was resumed, spectators crowded the table ten deep. Men estimated Brent's winnings at anywhere from one to five millions and there was an electric thrill in the air as the players settled themselves in their chairs and counted their stacks of chips. The game was limited to eight players, and Camillo Bill Waters arriving too late to be included, promptly bought the seat of a prospector named Troy, paying therefor twenty-thousand dollars in dust. "We're after yer hide," he grinned good-naturedly at Brent, "an' I'm backin' the hunch that we're a-goin' to hang it on the fence this day."
"Come and get it!" laughed Brent. "But I'll give you fair warning that I wear it tight and before you rip it off someone's going to get hurt." Cards in hand he glanced at the tense faces around the board. "I've got a hunch that this game is going to make history on the Yukon," he smiled, "And it better be opened formally with a good stiff round of
drinks." While they waited for the liquor his eye fell upon the face of Johnny Claw, who sat at the table, the second man from his right. "I thought you wouldn't sit in a game with me," he said, truculently.
"An' I wouldn't, neither, while yer luck was runnin'—but, it's different, now. Yer luck's busted—an' you'll be busted. An' I'm right here to git my money back, an' some of yourn along with it."
Brent laughed: "You won't be in the game an hour, Claw. I don't like you, and I don't like your business, and the best thing you can do is to cash in right now before the game starts."
A moment of tense silence followed Brent's words, for among the men of the Yukon, open insult must be wiped out in blood. But Claw made no move except to reach out and finger a stack of chips, while men shot sidewise glances into each other's faces. The stack of chips rattled upon the cloth under the play of his nervous fingers, and Kitty, who had taken her position directly behind Brent with a small slippered foot upon a rung of his chair, tittered. Claw took his cue from the sound and laughed loudly: "I'll play my cards, an' you play yourn, an' I'll do my cashin' in later," he answered. "An' here's the drinks, so le's liquor an' git to goin'." He downed his whiskey at a gulp, the bartender removed the empty glasses, and the big game was on.
The play ran rather cautiously at first, even more
cautiously than usual. But there was an unwonted tenseness in the atmosphere. Each man had bought ten thousand dollars worth of chips, with the white chips at one hundred dollars, the reds at five hundred, and blues at a thousand—and each man knew that his stack was only a shoestring.