he 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 a