“Certainly ...  But hurry!  Do you accept?”

“Senor, I would not sell that girl for all the gold of the Indies,” replied Durade, instantly.  No vacillation—­no indecision in him here.  Hough’s offer held no lure for this Spaniard who had committed many crimes for gold.

“But you’ll gamble her!” asserted Hough, and now indeed his words were mockery.  In one splendid gesture he swept his winnings into the middle of the table, and the gold gave out a ringing clash.  As a gambler he read the soul of his opponent.

Durade’s jaw worked convulsively, as if he had difficulty in holding it firm enough for utterance.  What he would not sell for any price he would risk on a gambler’s strange faith in chance.

“All my winnings against this girl,” went on Hough, relentlessly.  Scorn and a taunting dare and an insidious persuasion mingled with the passion of his offer.  He knew how to inflame.  Durade, as a gambler, was a weakling in the grasp of a giant.  “Come! ...  Do you accept?”

Durade’s body leaped, as if an irresistible current had been shot into it.

“Si, Senor!” he cried, with power and joy in his voice.  In that moment, no doubt the greatest in his life of gambling, he unconsciously went back to the use of his mother tongue.

Actuated by one impulse, Hough and Durade sat down at the table.  The others crowded around.  Fresno lurched close, with a wicked gleam in his eyes.

“I was onto Hough,” he said to his nearest ally.  “It’s the girl he’s after!”

The gamblers cut the cards for who should deal.  Hough won.  For him victory seemed to exist in the suspense of the very silence, in the charged atmosphere of the room.  He began to shuffle the cards.  His hands were white, shapely, perfect, like a woman’s, and yet not beautiful.  The spirit, the power, the ruthless nature in them had no relation to beauty.  How marvelously swift they moved—­too swift for the gaze to follow.  And the incomparable dexterity with which he manipulated the cards gave forth the suggestion as to what he could do with them.  In those gleaming hands, in the flying cards, in the whole intenseness of the gambler there showed the power and the intent to win.  The crooked Durade had met his match, a match who toyed with him.  If there were an element of chance in this short game it was that of the uncertainty of life, not of Durade’s chance to win.  He had no chance.  No eye, no hand could have justly detected Hough in the slightest deviation from honesty.  Yet all about the man in that tense moment proved what a gambler really was.

Durade called in a whisper for two cards, and he received them with trembling fingers.  Terrible hope and exultation transformed his face.

“I’ll take three,” said Hough, calmly.  With deliberate care and slowness, in strange contrast to his former motions, he took, one by one, three cards from the deck.  Then he looked at them, and just as calmly dropped all his cards, face up, on the table, disclosing what he knew to be an unbeatable hand.