The third night of play, as Smoke laid his first bet, the game-keeper
shoved fifteen dollars back to him.
"Ten's all you can play," he said. "The limit's come down."
"Gettin' picayune," Shorty sneered.
"No one has to play at this table that don't want to," the keeper
retorted. "And I'm willing to say straight out in meeting that we'd
sooner your pardner didn't play at our table."
"Scared of his system, eh?" Shorty challenged, as the keeper paid over
three hundred and fifty dollars.
"I ain't saying I believe in system, because I don't. There never was
a system that'd beat roulette or any percentage game. But just the
same I've seen some queer strings of luck, and I ain't going to let
this bank go bust if I can help it."
"Cold feet."
"Gambling is just as much business, my friend, as any other business.
We ain't philanthropists."
Night by night, Smoke continued to win. His method of play varied.
Expert after expert, in the jam about the table, scribbled down his
bets and numbers in vain attempts to work out his system. They
complained of their inability to get a clew to start with, and swore
that it was pure luck, though the most colossal streak of it they had
ever seen.
It was Smoke's varied play that obfuscated them. Sometimes, consulting
his note-book or engaging in long calculations, an hour elapsed without
his staking a chip. At other times he would win three limit-bets and
clean up a thousand dollars and odd in five or ten minutes. At still
other times, his tactics would be to scatter single chips prodigally
and amazingly over the table. This would continue for from ten to
thirty minutes of play, when, abruptly, as the ball whirled through the
last few of its circles, he would play the limit on column, colour, and
number, and win all three. Once, to complete confusion in the minds of
those that strove to divine his secret, he lost forty straight bets,
each at the limit. But each night, play no matter how diversely,
Shorty carried home thirty-five hundred dollars for him.
"It ain't no system," Shorty expounded at one of their bed-going
discussions. "I follow you, an' follow you, but they ain't no
figgerin' it out. You never play twice the same. All you do is pick
winners when you want to, an' when you don't want to, you just on
purpose don't."
"Maybe you're nearer right than you think, Shorty. I've just got to
pick losers sometimes. It's part of the system."
"System--hell! I've talked with every gambler in town, an' the last
one is agreed they ain't no such thing as system."
"Yet I'm showing them one all the time."
"Look here, Smoke." Shorty paused over the candle, in the act of
blowing it out. "I'm real irritated. Maybe you think this is a
candle. It ain't. An' this ain't me neither. I'm out on trail
somewheres, in my blankets, lyin' on my back with my mouth open, an'
dreamin' all this. That ain't you talkin', any more than this candle
is a candle."
"It's funny, how I happen to be dreaming along with you then," Smoke
persisted.
"No, it ain't. You're part of my dream, that's all. I've hearn many a
man talk in my dreams. I want to tell you one thing, Smoke. I'm
gettin' mangy an' mad. If this here dream keeps up much more I'm goin'
to bite my veins an' howl."