“I don’t understand.”

“You said you could kill Glenister.”

“I could.”

“Don’t you love—­”

“I hate him,” she interrupted, hoarsely.  He gave her a mirthless smile, and spying the crap-dealer leaving his bankrupt table, called him over and said: 

“Toby, I want you to ‘drive the hearse’ when Glenister begins to play faro.  I’ll deal.  Understand?”

“Sure!  Going to give him a little ‘work,’ eh?”

“I never dealt a crooked card in this camp,” exclaimed the Kid, “but I’ll ‘lay’ that man to-night or I’ll kill him!  I’ll use a ‘sand-tell,’ see!  And I want to explain my signals to you.  If you miss the signs you’ll queer us both and put the house on the blink.”

He rapidly rehearsed his signals in a jargon which to a layman would have been unintelligible, illustrating them by certain almost imperceptible shiftings of the fingers or changes in the position of his hand, so slight as to thwart discovery.  Through it all the girl stood by and followed his every word and motion with eager attention.  She needed no explanation of the terms they used.  She knew them all, knew that the “hearse-driver” was the man who kept the cases, knew all the code of the “inside life.”  To her it was all as an open page, and she memorized more quickly than did Toby the signs by which the Bronco Kid proposed to signal what card he had smuggled from the box or held back.

In faro it is customary for the case-keeper to sit on the opposite side of the table from the dealer, with a device before him resembling an abacus, or Chinese adding-machine.  When a card is removed from the faro-box by the dealer, the “hearse-driver” moves a button opposite a corresponding card on his little machine, in order that the players, at a glance, may tell what spots have been played or are still in the box.  His duties, though simple, are important, for should he make an error, and should the position of his counters not tally with the cards in the box on the “last turn,” all bets on the table are declared void.  When honestly dealt, faro is the fairest of all gambling games, but it is intricate, and may hide much knavery.  When the game is crooked, it is fatal, for out of the ingenuity of generations of card sharks there have been evolved a multitude of devices with which to fleece the unsuspecting.  These are so carefully masked that none but the initiated may know them, while the freemasonry of the craft is strong and discovery unusual.

Instead of using a familiar arrangement like the “needle-tell,” wherein an invisible needle pricks the dealer’s thumb, thus signalling the presence of certain cards, the Bronco Kid had determined to use the “sand-tell.”  In other words, he would employ a “straight box,” but a deck of cards, certain ones of which had been roughened or sand-papered slightly, so that, by pressing more heavily on the top or exposed card, the one beneath would stick to its neighbor above,