V.—SEVEN BLUE DOVES
They had not been playing more than half an hour when Bulldog Carney felt there was something wrong with the game. Perhaps it was that he was overtired—that he should have taken advantage of the first bed he had seen in a month, for he had just come in off the trail to Bucking Horse, the little, old, worn-out, mining town, perched high in the Rockies on the Canadian side of the border.
From the very first he had been possessed of a mental unrest not habitual with him at poker. His adventurous spirit had always found a risk, a high stake, an absolute sedative; it steadied his nerve—gave him a concentrated enjoyment of pulled-together mental force. But to-night there was a scent of evil in the room.
A curious room, too, in which to be playing a game of poker for high stakes, for it was the Mounted Police shack at Bucking Horse. But Sergeant Black was away on patrol, or over at Fort Steel, and at such times the key of the log barracks was left with Seth Long at his hotel, the Gold Nugget. And it was Seth who had suggested that they play in the police shack rather than in a room of the hotel.
Carney could not explain to himself why the distrust, why the feeling that everything was not on the level; but he had a curious conviction that some one in the party knew every time he drew cards just what was in his hand; that some one always overmastered him; and this was a new sensation to Bulldog, for if there ever was a a poker face he owned it. His steel-gray eyes were as steady, as submerged to his will, as the green on a forest tree. And as to the science of the game, with its substructure of nerve, he possessed it in excelsis.
He watched each successive dealer of the cards unobtrusively; watched hand after hand dealt, and knew that every card had been slipped from the top; that the shuffle had been clean, a whispering riffle without catch or trick, and the same pack was on the table that they had started with. He had not lost anything to speak of—and here was the hitch, the enigma of it. Once he felt that a better hand than his own had been deliberately laid down when he had raised; another time he had been called when a raise would have cost him dear, for he was overheld; twice he had been raised out of it before the draw. He felt that this had been done simply to keep him out of those hands, and both times the Stranger had lost heavily.
Seth Long had won; but to suspicion that Seth Long could manipulate a card was to imagine a glacier dancing a can-can. Seth was all thumbs; his mind, so to speak, was all thumbs.
Cranford, the Mining Engineer, was different.
He was mentality personified; that curious type, high velocity delicately balanced, his physical structure of the flexible tenuous quality of spring steel. He might be a dangerous man if roused. Beneath the large dome of his thin Italian-pale face were dreamy black eyes. He was hard to place. He was a mining engineer without a mine to manage. He was somewhat of a promoter—of restless activity. He was in Bucking Horse on some sort of a mine deal about which Carney knew nothing. If he had been a gambler Carney would have considered him the author of the unrest that hung so evilly over the game.