“You must be crazy about him!” The words seemed wrung from the Sheriff against his will.

“That’s my business!” came like a knife-cut from the Girl.

“Do you know you’re talkin’ to the Sheriff?”

“I’m talkin’ to Jack Rance, the gambler,” she amended evenly.

“You’re right,—­and he’s just fool enough to take you up,” returned Rance with sudden decision.  He looked around him for a chair; there was one near the table, and the Girl handed it to him.  With one hand he swung it into place before the table, while with the other he jerked off the table-cover, and flung it across the room.  Johnson neither moved nor groaned, as the edge slid from beneath his nerveless arms.

“You and the cyards have got into my blood.  I’ll take you up,” he said, seating himself.

“Your word,” demanded the Girl, leaning over the table, but still standing.

“I can lose like a gentleman,” returned Rance curtly; then, with a swift seizure of her hand, he continued tensely, in tones that made the Girl shrink and whiten, “I’m hungry for you, Min, and if I win, I’ll take it out on you as long as I have breath.”

A moment later, the Girl had freed her hand from his clasp, and was saying evenly, “Fix the lamp.”  And while the Sheriff was adjusting the wick that had begun to flare up smokily, she swiftly left the room, saying casually over her shoulder that she was going to fetch something from the closet.

“What you goin’ to get?” he called after her suspiciously.  The Girl made no reply.  Rance made no movement to follow her, but instead drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them with practiced carelessness.  But when a minute had passed and the girl had not returned, he called once more, with growing impatience, to know what was keeping her.

“I’m jest gettin’ the cards an’ kind o’ steadyin’ my nerves,” she answered somewhat queerly through the doorway.  The next moment she had returned, quickly closing the closet door behind her, blew out her candle, and laying a pack of cards upon the table, said significantly: 

“We’ll use a fresh deck.  There’s a good deal depends on this, Jack.”  She seated herself opposite the Sheriff and so close to the unconscious form of the man she loved that from time to time her left arm brushed his shoulder.

Rance, without protest other than a shrug, took up his own deck of cards, wrapped them in a handkerchief, and stowed them away in his pocket.  It was the Girl who spoke first: 

“Are you ready?”

“Ready?  Yes.  I’m ready.  Cut for deal.”

With unfaltering fingers, the Girl cut.  Of the man beside her, dead or dying, she must not, dared not think.  For the moment she had become one incarnate purpose:  to win, to win at any cost,—­nothing else mattered.

Rance won the deal; and taking up the pack he asked, as he shuffled: 

“A case of show-down?”