From behind a grating the man peered at them doubtfully.  Bromfield showed a card, and after some hesitation on the part of his inquisitor, passed the examination.  Toward Clay the doorkeeper jerked his head inquiringly.

“He’s all right,” the clubman vouched.

Again there was a suspicious and lengthy scrutiny.

The door opened far enough to let them slide into a scantily furnished hall.  On the first landing was another guard, a heavy, brutal-looking fellow who was no doubt the “chucker-out.”  He too looked them over closely, but after a glance at the card drew aside to let them pass.

Through a door near the head of the stairs they moved into a large room, evidently made from several smaller ones with the partitions torn down and the ceilings pillared at intervals.

Clay had read about the magnificence of Canfield’s in the old days, and he was surprised that one so fastidious as Bromfield should patronize a place so dingy and so rough as this.  At the end of one room was a marble mantelpiece above which there was a defaced, gilt-frame mirror.  The chandeliers, the chairs, the wall-paper, all suggested the same note of one-time opulence worn to shabbiness.

A game of Klondike was going.  There were two roulette wheels, a faro table, and one circle of poker players.

The cold eyes of a sleek, slippery man sliding cards out of a faro-box looked at the Westerner curiously.  Among the suckers who came to this den of thieves to be robbed were none of Clay’s stamp.  Lindsay watched the white, dexterous hands of the dealer with an honest distaste.  All along the border from Juarez to Calexico he had seen just such soft, skilled fingers fleecing those who toiled.  He knew the bloodless, impassive face of the professional gambler as well as he knew the anxious, reckless ones of his victims.  His knowledge had told him little good of this breed of parasites who preyed upon a credulous public.

The traffic of this room was crooked business by day as well as by night.  A partition ran across the rear of the back parlor which showed no opening but two small holes with narrow shelves at the bottom.  Back of that was the paraphernalia of the pool-room, another device to separate customers from their money by playing the “ponies.”

As Clay looked around it struck him that the personnel of this gambling-den’s patrons was a singularly depressing one.  All told there were not a dozen respectable-looking people in the room.  Most of those present were derelicts of life, the failures of a great city washed up by the tide.  Some were pallid, haggard wretches clinging to the vestiges of a prosperity that had once been theirs.  Others were hard-faced ruffians from the underworld.  Not a few bore the marks of the drug victim.  All of those playing had a manner of furtive suspicion.  They knew that if they risked their money the house would rob them.  Yet they played.