“If I plays long enough,” growled Phil, seating himself and shoving a stack of chips on the fifteen spot and sparing a few for the single and double O.
Still voicing that deep-throated laugh, Jim raked them in, and again asserted that all men who came to his wheel lost; but Phil, angry, doubled his stakes, and assumed a grin. Five times in succession he lost, and then bought more chips, and now the grin had given place to a sullen frown.
“There’ll be trouble with that fool yet,” said George to me, “and it’ll be his own bloomin’ fault, because he’s been warned often enough by Jim.”
We drew closer to the table, as did several others, seeing that Mahoney’s bets were increasing; but his exclamations of disappointment were drowned in the babel of sound that weltered throughout the Hang-out. Jim had begun by taunting him; but now, discovering his ill temper, as merely the cool “wheelman,” twirling the little white ball, and raking in the losses, or paying out the winnings. Once he objected to something Phil said.
“What makes you play when luck’s all against you?” he demanded. “It’s not my fault if you lose all the time, is it?”
But Phil, by this time heavily short in purse, played on with a certain unmistakable desperation, and lost with a persistence that rapidly depleted his bag of gold dust. Now and then he won for a few turns of the illusive wheel, but the certain percentage of the game against him again told, and finally he was down to his last money. He staked everything recklessly on the old “star combination,” and Jim waited patiently for him to place his bet, and, it seemed to me, with a faint hope that it might be withdrawn.
“All bets down?” he demanded at last.
“Ain’t blind, are you?” was Phil’s surly response, and Jim, with a slight shrug, twirled the ball. It hovered aimlessly for two or three turns as the wheel slowed down, and once it threatened to fall into a winning pocket; then, with the perversity of fortune, it slipped quietly into a partition and lay there. For a full quarter of a minute Jim did not touch it, nor the stakes that Phil had lost, and then he slowly reached over and swept the table clean, and, as he did so, again vented that slow laugh of his.
“Told you I’d get you,” he said; but in the friendliest and most careless of tones.
Phil, who had risen to his feet as the wheel spun, stood as if transfixed by adversity when Jim swept the last of the money into the drawer; but his lips were drawn back into a stiff, snarling grin, and his eyes were wild with disappointment and anger. At the sound of Jim’s laugh he suddenly broke loose into a storm of oaths, and, almost before any one could realize his intent, so swift was his action, he whipped a gun from his belt and “threw it down” on the wheelman.