eight! Then, two deuces-a hard four! That made four of them now, four hard fours! And it made the man winner.
Mitch stood stunned, certain of the truth but unable to associate it with the circumstance. The man wasn't a hustler. These people knew him; he was obviously a friend of long standing. At any rate, no hustler would be so crude. He wouldn't have to. It was too dangerous. The dice handler depended on skill, not some device which he might be caught with.
Laughing, the prematurely gray man gestured, indicating that he would shoot the whole thirty grand. Then he saw Mitch's expression, and his smile drew in, and he acted. Swiftly he swept the money up with his dice hand, jamming it into his already-bulging coat pocket. With the same movement, his hand came out of the pocket and spun two dice out on the table.
'Pass the dice,' he smiled pleasantly at Mitch. 'I hope you'll have my luck, sir.'
'It isn't luck,' Mitch said. 'You're using crooked dice.'
'What?' A perplexed smile-frown. 'That's not a very good joke, my friend.'
Mitch nodded, agreeing that it wasn't. He asked to see the dice the man had been using. 'The ones in your pocket, I mean. You switched them when you were handling your money.'
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Downing rise, march Red firmly toward the door while she looked anxiously back over her shoulder. That was the right thing to do, of course, but it added nothing to his assurance. There was a hint in it that he, Mitch Corley, had pulled a giant economy-sized goof.
'I mean it,' he said doggedly. 'You won that money with crooked dice.'
'Did I? Does anyone else feel the same way?'
No one did, and they made it clear. They seemed to move a little closer to the gray-haired man, staring coldly at Mitch; a kindred group, facing a common enemy.
'You're free to search me, if you do.' The man looked around at them, beaming. 'I'm always willing to oblige a friend.'
'Don't be silly, Johnny,'-an embarrassed murmur. 'What the hell, Johnny? We're all pals here.'
The gray head turned to Mitch, focused amused eyes on him. 'It looks like you made a mistake, my friend. Possibly you've had a little too much to drink.'
'There's no mistake. Now, I'll take a look at those dice!'
'Help yourself. The dice are on the table.'
'I mean the ones in your pocket. I'll take a look at them, or I'll take three thousand dollars!'
'No,' the man smiled firmly. 'That isn't what you'll do, at all.'
Mitch took a step toward the man. The man fell back into a fighting crouch. At the same instant, a steely grip closed over Mitch's arm and whirled him around.
It was the stocky, broad-shouldered man who had met him and Red at the entrance to the clubhouse. The maоtre d', perhaps, or a captain of waiters.
'Yes?' he said, in his faintly musical voice. 'What seems to be the trouble?'
Mitch told him curtly. The stocky man shook his head. 'That's impossible. Just who are you to make such a charge?'
'You know who I am,' Mitch snapped. 'You saw, my guest card tonight.'
'May I see it again, please?'
Mitch handed it to him. The man scanned it, ripped it in two, and dropped the pieces on the floor.
'You're not welcome here, Mr. Corley. I advise you to leave immediately.'
'Now, wait a minute!' Mitch raged. 'What kind of a place is this, anyway? I get cheated out of three thousand dollars, and you-Just who the hell are you to push me around?'
'No one has pushed you around, Mr. Corley. Any disturbance has been caused by you.'
'We'll see what the manager has to say! Now, I want your name!'
'Of course,' the man nodded. 'The name is Jake Zearsdale.'
8
Red had fallen asleep, at last.
Mitch moved quietly from her side, tucked the covers back around her and went into the front room. He fixed himself a drink. Taking it over to a window, he stood looking out over the city. Troubledly, staring unseeing at the sleeping metropolis, he sorted through the night's happenings.
There had been nothing to do but leave the club quietly, of course. Cheated of three thousand dollars, a serious loss at this particular time, he could only leave, hoping that this would be the end of the matter. Which, according to Frank Downing, it might not be. The gray- haired man, Downing told him, was a long-time friend and business associate of Zearsdale. And Zearsdale was a man who cherished a friend and cracked down hard on an enemy.
Red and Downing were waiting at the club entrance when he came out that night. The gambler was cynically amused by what had happened.
'Maybe we could go into partnership, Mitch. There ought to be big money in renting you Out as a chump.'
'Now, you just stop that, Frank,' Red scolded. 'Mitch did exactly the right thing!'
'Did he? Then how come he's got that egg all over his face? So much that it even rubbed off on me.'
'I'm sorry,' Mitch said. 'I hope I haven't spoiled anything for you, Frank.'
Downing said that only time would tell about that. If the club had members who used six-four-eight dice, he wasn't sure that he wanted membership anyway.
Mitch declared that the man had been using them, all right. Downing shrugged, nodded.
'If you say so. He probably saw that big chump sign you're wearing.'
Red punched the gambler on the arm. Mitch said, 'All right, Frank, just what should I have done? What would you have done?'
'I'd have watched the dice awhile before I did any fading, if I'd been sap enough to buck a game like that in the first place.'
'You mean I should have been looking for a cheat among those people?'
'Well, maybe not,' Downing admitted. 'But you should have kept your mouth shut after you got clipped. What did you expect this Johnny Birdwell to do?-confess that he was a mechanic? Did you think his friends were going to toss him over and side with you?'
Mitch couldn't argue the point. Obviously, in view of the way things had turned out, he had been wrong to holler. Along with the loss of his three grand, he had also lost the potentially lucrative opportunity to return to the club and had possibly gotten himself a powerful enemy.
'So okay, I'm a chump,' he sighed. 'What do I do about it?'
'Shoot yourself. What else?' Downing laughed and held out his hand. 'Take it easy, you two. And come and see me whenever you're in Dallas.'
He meant it. The gambler did not pretend friendliness when be felt unfriendly. So that at least, Mitch thought, was a break. To have had Downing sore at him on top of everything else- the shortage of money, the lack of immediate prospects-
Well, there was one prospect. Winfield Lord, Jr. And there was a way, seemingly, to collect on Lord's nominally worthless checks.
Mitch returned to bed, slightly cheered. But very slightly. A vague feeling of unease gnawed at him, a premonition that tonight's misadventure portended still further trouble. Zearsdale?-Well, just what could Zearsdale do, anyway? The oilman would find Mitch Corley's nose very, very clean. Much cleaner, doubtless, than that of the workaday citizen. The Mitch Corleys of the world could not afford the petty nastiness, the shady little deeds, which were generally shrugged off as the everybody-does-it-norm. They, the world's Corleys, shuddered at
