ore a green eye shade, and a diamond
glittered in his fancy shirt. He was a gambler.

The game seesawed for a time. First Kid Wolf would make a small
winning, and then the man with the green eye shade. Most of the bets,
however, were so heavy as to make the Mexicans about the table gasp
with envy.

But the crisis was coming. The deal passed from the gambler to The Kid
and back to the gambler again. The pot was already swollen from the
antes. The Kid opened.

"I'm stayin'," said the gambler crisply. He pushed in a small pile of
gold. "How many cards?"

"Two," murmured The Kid.

The gambler took one. The chances were, then, that he had two pairs,
or was drawing to make a flush or a straight.

Carefully the two men looked at their cards. Not a muscle of their
faces twitched. The gambler's face was frozen--as expressionless as an
Indian's. Kid Wolf was his easy self. His usual smile was very much
in evidence, unchanged. He made a bet--a large one, and the gambler
called and raised heavily. The Kid boosted it again. Then there was a
silence, broken only by the tense breathing of the onlookers, who had
pushed even closer about the table.

"Five hundred more," said the gambler after a nerve-racking pause.

"And five," The Kid drawled softly, pushing most of his gold into the
center of the table.

The gambler's hand shook the merest trifle. Again he looked at the
pasteboards in his pale hands. Then he quickly pushed every cent he
had into the pot.

"I'm seeing it, and I'm elevatin' it every coin on me. It'll cost
yuh--let's see--eight hundred and sixty more!"

It was more than the Texan had--by four hundred dollars. He could,
however, stay for his stack. The man in the green eye shade could take
out four hundred to even the bet. The Kid, though, did not do this.

"I'll just write an I O U fo' the balance," he drawled.

"But supposin' yore I O U ain't good?"

"Then this is good," said Kid Wolf.

The gambler stared. The Texan had placed a .45 on the table near his
right hand. And it had been done so quickly that the onlookers
exchanged glances. Who was this hombre?

"All right," growled the man in the green eye shade.

Kid Wolf wrote something with a pencil stub on a bit of paper. When
finished, he tossed it to the center of the gold pile, carefully folded.

"That calls yo'," he said coolly. "What have yo'?"

Nervously, the gambler spread his hand face up on the table. His hands