"Well?"
Before answering, Pemmican of the low brow shrugged his shoulders and
spread out his palms, then he said pointedly:--
"Only that he pulled out ten thousand on Flora McQueen--that's all!"
"What?" Challoner began to understand.
Pemmican nodded.
"Sure thing--ten thousand dollars!"
Slowly and deliberately Challoner refilled his glass to the brim. For a
moment there was silence, then Pemmican repeated tantalisingly:--
"Ten thousand dollars--not a cent less!"
Challoner thought for a moment.
"How did you come out?" he asked, much to the other's surprise.
Pemmican shook his head.
"I lost a cool thousand because I did not back the mare. I played on
Tigerskin. I've got to get that thousand back, somehow."
Challoner emptied his glass.
"Was Colonel Hargraves down there alone?" His voice was thick, hoarse.
"Where?" returned Pemmican, as if he had misunderstood.
"At Gravesend?"
Pemmican looked long and quizzically into Challoner's eyes.
"He was ... not," was his simple but significant answer, and moved away.
But Challoner followed him up, and seizing his arm, said somewhat
gruffly:--
"Look here, Pemmican, if Hargraves comes in--I want to see him--tell him
to wait for me."
For the first time Pemmican's eyes lost their curious tiredness, an
enigmatical smile played about the corners of his mouth.
"Yes," he said simply, and nodding, went his way.
Left alone, Challoner found himself a prey to all the black fiends of
rage, jealousy and desire for revenge. For a time everything was blotted
out from his vision except the face of Letty Love and the face of
Colonel Hargraves. "This small world," he muttered to himself, "is much
too small for me and Colonel Hargraves!" With that there loomed up out
of the mists of his mind the brilliantly lighted and ornate entrance of
a certain apartment-house a short distance away; and a few minutes
later, obedient to his subconscious will, his feet carried him down the
stairs to a door evidently leading to the outside. A few words of
explanation from Challoner to the man on duty there were necessary
before he would proceed to undo the complicated system of bolts; and
then he passed out and was under the starry skies. Challoner was not the
first man of social prominence in the community that could directly
trace the beginning of his life as an outcast to passing through that
door!