“Play!” said Carl briefly.  White and grim his guest obeyed.

In terrible silence they played the game through to the end.

“Let me pour you some more whiskey,” insisted Carl with infernal courtesy.  “Let us understand each other.  Whenever I drink, I expect you to do the same.  As for you, Hunch, you’ll kindly stay sober!”

Jokai gulped the nauseating torture to the end.  He was faint and sick.  By the end of the third game, every move had become convulsive.  The insidious bite of the current was getting horribly on his nerves.  Still with desperate will he played on.  Drunk and dizzy—­his veins hot and pounding, he stared in fascinated horror at the face of his merciless opponent.  Through the film of smoke it loomed vividly dark, impudent, ironic, the mobile mouth edged satirically with a slight smile.

“Are you man or devil?” he whispered.

Carl laughed.  His hand, for all his drinking, was calm and steady, his handsome eyes clear and cold and resolute.

“Hunch,” he said curtly, “if you touch that bottle again, I’ll break it over your head.  You’re drunk now.”

To Jokai his voice trailed off into curious nothingness.  Somewhere he knew in a room stifling hot and hazy with the fumes of vile tobacco there was a voice, musical, detached and very far away.

“Monsieur,” it was saying, “there are still the questions.”

With shaking hand Jokai touched a metal king and screamed.  The heat and the hell-board hard upon his days and nights of enforced drinking were too much.  With a strangled sob, Jokai of Vienna pitched forward upon the board unconscious.

Carl swept the metal men away with a shrug.

“Poor devil!” he said pityingly.  “All this hell sooner than answer a question or two.  By to-morrow night, with another dose of the same medicine, he’ll feel differently.  Likely I’ll run up to Connecticut to-night, Hunch, to see my aunt.  I’ll be back by noon to-morrow.  Tear off the window boards and give him some more air.  You can move him to another room in the morning.”

Hunch obeyed, and presently as the street door slammed behind his chief, Hunch’s single eye roved expectantly to the forgotten whiskey on the table.  Jokai lay in a motionless stupor by the window.  It would be morning before the hapless drinker would be quite himself again.  With brutal, powerful arms, Hunch bore his charge to an adjoining room and consigned him disrespectfully to a bed.  Then with a fresh bottle of whiskey in his hand, he returned to the open window, leered pleasantly at the dizzy glare of city lights beyond and henceforth devoted himself to getting very drunk.  Having gratified this bibulous ambition to the uttermost, he fell asleep.  The morning sunlight flaming at last on his coarse, bloated face awoke him to resentful consciousness.  Glowering at the bright, warm light with his single eye, Hunch rolled away into the shadow and went to sleep again.