"Monte," said Gard. It was not the name the German recognized. Kirtley laughed over this old county fair acquaintance. Three card monte under the walls of Charlemagne's church! This was bringing the ancient and the modern together with a vengeance. Furstenheimer thought the game was droll. He had never seen any played like that.
"How can that be a game!" he exclaimed—"only three cards! You must have left out something. It looks ridiculous. What's the point?"
"Why, you bet!" cried the dealer who was awkwardly manipulating the cards. The two strangers wagered with each other, and the Wuerttemberger at last got interested and bet first against one, then the other. In a few minutes he had lost two hundred marks to the dealer, and acted as if worried. The dealer won also from his associate, but not so readily.
"A gambler, and playing clumsily to fool me," Gard had promptly said to himself. He endeavored to save his friend from falling deeper into the toils. He nudged him under the table, but the Teuton stupidly understood nothing. He kept on, more and more distraught, losing money, then groaning about it and wiping his trickling and distressed countenance.
When the dealer finally saw that Kirtley would not wager, he grew noisy.
"Not to play your own national game—is it polite, I say?" He flaunted the cards before Gard.
"I do not bet," Kirtley repeated as pleasantly as he could, and the tall German tried to quiet his mate.
The rain, which had been brewing, presently began to come down and was breaking up the sport. They agreed to dine in the inn and go back to town when the downpour was over. Gard's friend squared accounts—four hundred and eighty marks passed across. He looked unhappy enough. But the dealer was still far from satisfied because the American had not played. The German had won from the other two. Could he not win from an American in an American game? He had been eager to wager at one turn all the money he had gained.
"A pair of cheap gamblers," Gard repeated to himself. He wished his foolish friend from Wuerttemberg had kept out of it. They were here on the edge of a strange city, in an unknown inn, at nightfall. It showed that Furstenheimer was a green country man who, as he admitted, had seldom been away from home. He had not even seen his neighboring Rhine in years.
The rain was now pelting them and they scurried indoors.