CHAPTER ONE
PROSPEROUS DAYS
1.
“BY Goad!” said MacTaggart, sipping his second whiskey, “the auld man’s a wizard. He’s got me fair bamboozilt.”
It was evening, and he and Hugh were sitting in the Café de Paris.
“I thocht I knew something o’ roulette, but noo I maun jist go back tae Strathbungo and play dominoes. And you, young man, wi’ that canny wee smile on yer gub,—I’m thinkin’ ye ken mair aboot it than ye want tae tell.”
Hugh shook his head.
“No, I can’t grasp it. And yet I’m with the old man every day. The scientific explanation of it’s beyond me. A mathematical mystery. Your system and all the others are based on the laws of average, the equilibrium. It’s a calculation of chances, of probabilities. So far so good! The law of average does exist. It’s all rot to say that the coup that’s gone has no influence on the one that is to come. It has. It’s true that the slots are all the same size and so each has an equal claim to the ball, but it is because of this equal chance that they will each receive it an equal number of times. I’ve seen a number come up three times in succession, yet I wouldn’t hesitate to bet thirty-five to one, in thousands, that it won’t come up a fourth time. Mechanically, maybe it has an equal chance with the others, but by the law of average, no.”
“That’s elementary,” said MacTaggart.
“Yes, but it’s as deep as the most of us get. We’re all in the kindergarten class. We grope vaguely. We fumble with probabilities. As far as we go we are right; but we don’t go far enough. We reach a point where our system breaks down. The law of average is too big for us to compress into a formula. In its larger workings it eludes us; we cannot regulate it. Our observations of it are too limited.”
“I’ve got a record of over two hundred thousand consecutive coups,” said MacTaggart.