The gambling-room was now fast filling up with the first of the theatre crowd.  DeLong’s table was the centre of attraction, owing to the high play.  A group of young men of his set were commiserating with him on his luck and discussing it with the finished air of roues of double their ages.  He was doggedly following his system.

Kennedy and I approached.

“Ah, here is the philosophical stranger again,” DeLong exclaimed, catching sight of Kennedy.  “Perhaps he can enlighten us on how to win at roulette by playing his own system.”

“Au contraire, monsieur, let me demonstrate how to lose,” answered Craig with a smile that showed a row of faultless teeth beneath his black moustache, decidedly foreign.

Kennedy played and lost, and lost again; then he won, but in the main he lost.  After one particularly large loss I felt his arm on mine, drawing me closely to him.  DeLong had taken a sort of grim pleasure in the fact that Kennedy, too, was losing.  I found that Craig had paused in his play at a moment when DeLong had staked a large sum that a number below “18” would turn up—­for five plays the numbers had been between “18” and “36.”  Curious to see what Craig was doing, I looked cautiously down between us.  All eyes were fixed on the wheel.  Kennedy was holding an ordinary compass in the crooked-up palm of his hand.  The needle pointed at me, as I happened to be standing north of it.

The wheel spun.  Suddenly the needle swung around to a point between the north and south poles, quivered a moment, and came to rest in that position.  Then it swung back to the north.

It was some seconds before I realized the significance of it.  It had pointed at the table—­and DeLong had lost again.  There was some electric attachment at work.

Kennedy and I exchanged glances, and he shoved the compass into my hand quickly.  “You watch it, Walter, while I play,” he whispered.

Carefully concealing it, as he had done, yet holding it as close to the table as I dared I tried to follow two things at once without betraying myself.  As near as I could make out, something happened at every play.  I would not go so far as to assert that whenever the large stakes were on a certain number the needle pointed to the opposite side of the wheel, for it was impossible to be at all accurate about it.  Once I noticed the needle did not move at all, and he won.  But on the next play he staked what I knew must be the remainder of his winnings on what seemed a very good chance.  Even before the wheel was revolved and the ball set rolling, the needle swung about, and when the platinum ball came to rest Kennedy rose from the table, a loser.

“By George, though,” exclaimed DeLong, grasping his hand.  “I take it all back.  You are a good loser, sir.  I wish I could take it as well as you do.  But then, I’m in too deeply.  There are too many ‘markers’ with the house up against me.”