moment which the hand of the clock trembles over, a hair's breadth
yet to go--these are no man's to claim. One is gone forever; the other
may mark the passing of his soul. Only this moment, this throb of the
heart, this half-drawn breath, is a living man's to claim. The beggar
has it; the monarch can command no more. Poor as he was, Dr. Slavens
thought, smiling as he worked his foot, into the trampled dust, he was
as rich in life's allotment as the best.

The sole of his cut and broken shoe struck some little thing which
resisted, then turned up white beneath his eye. Broken porcelain, or
bone fragment, it appeared. He would have pushed it aside with his toe;
but just then it turned, showing the marking of a die.

Here was a whimsical turn of circumstance, thought he. An outcast die
for a broken man, recalling by its presence the high games of chance
which both of them had played in their day and lost, perhaps. It was a
little, round-cornered die, its spots marked deep and plain. As it lay
in his hand it brought reminiscences of Hun Shanklin, for it was of his
pattern of dice, and his size, convenient for hiding between the fingers
of his deceptive hand.

Dr. Slavens rolled it on the box beside him. It seemed a true and honest
die, for it came up now an ace, now trey; now six, now deuce. He rolled
it, rolled it, thinking of Hun Shanklin and Hun's long, loose-skinned
hand.

For a place of wiles, such as Comanche had been and doubtless was still,
it was a very honest little die, indeed. What use would anybody have for
it there? he wondered. The memory of what he had seen dice do there
moved him to smile. Then the recollection of what had stood on that spot
came to him; the big tent, with the living pictures and variety show,
and Hun Shanklin's crescent table over against the wall.

That must have been the very spot of its location, with the divided wall
of the tent back of him, through which he had disappeared on the night
that Walker lost his money and Shanklin dropped his dice. Of course.
That was the explanation. The little cube in Slavens' palm was one of
Shanklin's honest dice, with which he tolled on the suckers. He had lost
one of them in his precipitate retreat.

Dr. Slavens put the cube in his pocket and got up, turning the debris of
the camp again with his foot, watching for the gleam of silver. As he
worked, a tubby man with whiskers turned out of the thin stream of
traffic which passed through the stree