Only the select attended the meetings at Fernand’s.  It was doubly hard to choose them.  They had to have enough money to afford high play, and they also had to lose without a murmur.  It made it extremely difficult to build up a clientele, but Fernand was equal to the task.  He seemed to smell out the character of a man or woman, to know at once how much iron was in their souls.  And, following the course of an evening’s play, Fernand knew the exact moment at which a man had had enough.  It was never twice the same for the same man.  A rich fellow, who lost twenty thousand one day and laughed at it, might groan and curse if he lost twenty hundred a week later.

It was Fernand’s desire to keep those groans and curses from being heard in his gaming house.  He extracted wallets painlessly, so to speak.

He was never crooked; and yet he would not have a dealer in his employ unless the fellow knew every good trick of running up the deck.  The reason was that, while Fernand never cheated in order to take money away from his customers, he very, very frequently had his men cheat in order to give money away.

This sounds like a mad procedure for the proprietor of a gaming house, but there were profound reasons beneath it.  For one of the maxims of Fernand—­and, like every gambler, he had many of them—­was that the best way to make a man lose money is first of all to make him win it.

Such was Monsieur Frederic Fernand.  And, if many compared him to Falstaff, and many pitied the merry, fat old man for having fallen into so hard a profession, yet there were a few who called him a bloated spider, holding his victims, with invisible cords, and bleeding them slowly to death.

To help him he had selected two men, both young, both shrewd, both iron in will and nerve and courage, both apparently equally expert with the cards, and both just as equally capable of pleasing his clients.  One was a Scotchman, McKeever; the other was a Jew, Simonds.  But in looks they were as much alike as two peas out of one pod.  They hated each other with silent, smiling hatred, because they knew that they were on trial for their fortunes.

Tonight the Jew, Simonds, was dealing at one of the tables, and the Scotchman, McKeever, stood at the side of the master of the house, ready to execute his commissions.  Now and again his dark eyes wandered toward the table where the Jew sat, with the cards flashing through his fingers.  McKeever hungered to be there on the firing line!  How he wished he could feel that sifting of the polished cardboard under his finger tips.  They were playing Black Jack.  He noted the smooth skill with which Simonds buried a card.  And yet the trick was not perfectly done.  Had he, McKeever, been there—­

At this point he was interrupted by the easy, oily voice of M. Fernand.  “This is an infernal nuisance!”

McKeever raised his eyebrows and waited for an explanation.  Two young men, very young, very straight, had just come into the rooms.  One he knew to be Jerry Smith.