A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth—cold and rigid.
At the farther end of the last room hung the huge painting of a leopard, so vivid and real its black and tawny colours, so furtive and wild its restless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.
Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magic green table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.
The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, Government officials, officers of the Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, and professional gamblers.
The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the last session of the House broken the “bank” in a single night, winning more than a hundred thousand dollars. He had lost it all and more in two weeks, and the courteous proprietor now held orders for the lion’s share of the total pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House of Representatives.
Over that table thousands of dollars of the people’s money had been staked and lost during the war by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents in charge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with a stainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out by those handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth could point out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet which marked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has ever sounded.
Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but he had just staked a twenty-dollar gold piece and won fourteen hundred dollars.
Howle, always at his elbow ready for a “sleeper” or a stake, said:
“Put a stack on the ace.”