He shrugged his own lithe shoulders in contempt and turned. The man on the stool behind the roulette wheel was yawning until his jaw muscles stood out in hard, pointed ridges, and his cheeks fell in ridiculously. Terry went back. He was not eager to win; but the gleam of colors on the wheel fascinated him. He placed five dollars, saw the wheel win, took in his winnings without emotion.
While he scooped the two coins up, he did not see the croupier turn his head and shoot a single glance to a fat, squat man in the corner of the room, a glance to which the fat man responded with the slightest of nods and smiles. He was the owner. And he was not particularly happy at the thought of some hundred and fifty dollars being taken out of his treasury by some chance stranger.
Terry did not see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm pool of gold, but he gave the sun at his feet no more than a casual glance. It was metallic gold that he was fascinated by and the whims and fancies of that singular wheel. Twice that afternoon his fortune had mounted above three thousand dollars—once it mounted to an even six thousand. He had stopped to count his winnings at this point, and on the verge of leaving decided to make it an even ten thousand before he went away. And five minutes later he was gambling with five hundred in his wallet.
When the sunlight grew yellow, other men began to enter the room. Terry was still at his post. He did not see them. There was no human face in the world for him except the colorless face of the croupier, and the long, pale eyelashes that lifted now and then over greenish-orange eyes. And Terry did not heed when he was shouldered by the growing crowd around the wheel.
He only knew that other bets were being placed and that it was a nuisance, for the croupier took much longer in paying debts and collecting winnings, so that the wheel spun less often.
Meantime he was by no means unnoticed. A little whisper had gone the rounds that a real plunger was in town. And when men came into the hall, their attention was directed automatically by the turn of other eyes toward six feet of muscular manhood, heavy-shouldered and erect, with a flare of a red silk bandanna around his throat and a heavy sombrero worn tilted a little to one side and back on his head.
"He's playing a system," said someone. "Been standing there all afternoon and making poor Pedro—the thief!—sweat and shake in his boots."
In fact, the owner of the place had lost his complacence and his smile together. He approached near to the wheel and watched its spin with a face turned sallow and flat of cheek from anxiety. For with the setting of the sun it seemed that luck flooded upon Terry Hollis. He began to bet in chunks of five hundred, alternating between the red and the odd, and winning with startling regularity. His winnings were now shoved into an awkward canvas bag. Twenty thousand dollars! That had grown from the fifty.
No wonder the crowd had two looks for Terry. His face had lost its color and grown marvellously expressionless.
"The real gambler's look," they said.