ee and gave his attention to his antagonist, a half-bred
Mexican of low-grade mentality who was offering a duel of wits! He bet
the requisite four dollars.

And now from Barbee's fingers came the last cards, one for Longstreet
and one for Chavez. Longstreet drew a queen and went into the silence
of deep meditation; to Chavez came a lowly seven. Longstreet needed no
prompting that it was time to bet; further he understood that this was
the last round, the final opportunity. He did not wait for the
customary raise of Chavez, but slipped five dollars into the pot and
sat back, beaming.

Nor did the Mexican hesitate. He pushed out to the centre of the table
with slow brown fingers two twenty-dollar gold pieces.

'You--you raise me?' asked Longstreet.

'_Si, senor_. Tirty-fife _pesos mas_.'

Longstreet curbed a desire to warn the man, to insist that he
reconsider. But in the end he kept his own counsel and made his
complementary bet of thirty-five dollars.

'Call you,' he said quite in his best form.

The Mexican extracted from the bottom of his cards the first one dealt
him face down and flipped it over carelessly. It was a ten; he had
three tens, and the professor's extremely handsome pairs of aces and
kings were as nothing. The Mexican's brown fingers drew the winnings
in toward him, Longstreet's fifty-one dollars among them. Longstreet
stared at him and at Barbee and at the treacherous cards themselves in
sheer bewilderment.

It was not that he was shocked at the loss of a rather large sum of
money in his present circumstances; his brain did not focus on the
point. He was trying to see in what his advance theories had
miscarried. For certainly it had seemed extremely unlikely that Chavez
would have had three tens. Why, there were only four tens in the deck
of fifty-two, there were four men playing, there remained in the deck,
untouched, thirty-two cards----

'Deal 'em up,' said Barbee. 'Your deal, old boy.'

'It lies entirely within the scope of conservative probability,' said
Longstreet blandly, his eyes carrying the look of a man who in spirit
is far away from his physical environment, 'that, after all, my data
were not sufficient.'

'Talking to me?' said Barbee. He made a playful show of looking over
his shoulder to the invisible recipient of Longstreet's confidences; at
the moment a door behind him opened and a new face did actually appear.
Barbee's glance grew into a stare of surprise.