A deep silence quickly fell upon the room.  It was the silence of suppressed excitement.  A silence only broken by monosyllabic and almost whispered betting and “raising” as the games proceeded.  An hour passed thus.  At the table where Lablache and John Allandale were playing the usual luck prevailed.  The money-lender seemed unable to do wrong, and at the other table Bunning-Ford was faring correspondingly badly.  Pedro Mancha, the Mexican, a man of obscure past and who lived no one quite knew how, but who always appeared to find the necessary to gamble with, was the favored one of dame Fortune.  Already he had heaped before him a pile of “bills” and I.O.U.’s most of which bore “Lord” Bill’s signature.  Looking on at either table, no one from outward signs could have said which way the luck was going.  Only the scribblings of the pencils upon the memo pads and the gradual accumulation of the precious slips of paper before Lablache at one table and the wild-eyed, dark-skinned Mexican at the other, told the story of the ruin which was surely being accomplished.

At length, with a loser’s privilege, Bunning-Ford, after glancing at his watch, rose from the table.  His lean face was in no way disturbed.  He seemed quite indifferent to his losses.

“I’ll quit you, Pedro,” he said, smiling lazily down at the Mexican.  “You’re a bit too hot for me to-day.”

The dark-skinned man smiled a vague, non-committing smile and displayed a double row of immaculate teeth.

“Good.  You shall have your revenge.  Doubtless you would like some of these papers back,” he said, as he swept them leisurely into his pocket-book, and then sugar-bagging a cigarette paper he poured a few grains of granulated tobacco into it.

“Yes, I daresay I shall relieve you of some later on,” replied Bill, quietly.  Then he turned to the other table and stood watching the play.

He glanced anxiously at the bare table in front of the old rancher.  Even Dr. Abbot was well stocked with slips of paper.  Then his gaze fell upon the money-lender, behind whose huge back he was standing.

He moved slightly to one side.  It is an unwritten law amongst poker players, in a public place in the west of the American continent, that no onlooker should stand immediately behind any player.  He moved to Lablache’s right.  The money-lender was dealing.  “Lord” Bill lit a cigarette.

The cards were dealt round.  Then the draw.  Then Lablache laid the pack down.  Bunning-Ford had noted these things mechanically.  Then something caught his attention.  It was his very indifference which caused his sudden attention.  Had he been following the game with his usual keenness he would only have been thinking of the betting.

Lablache was writing upon his memo, pad, which was a gorgeous effort in silver mounting.  One of those oblong blocks with a broad band of burnished silver at the binding of the perforated leaves.  He knew that this was the pad the money-lender always used; anyway, it was similar in all respects to his usual memorandum pads.