chestnut is a favourite. Of course you're
superstitious, Sibley. The tan and the green baize are covered with
ghosts that want to help you, if you'll let them."

Sibley's mouth opened in amazement. Crozier was speaking with the look
of the man who hypnotises himself, who "sees things," who dreams as only
the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
latter-day Irish poets.

"Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right," remarked Sibley
almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
brother. No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
could have looked or spoken like that.

Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:

"I don't know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I'm going to
the Logan Trial in spite of the M'Mahon mob. I don't feel about it as
you do. I've got a different feeling, Sibley. I'll play the game out.
I shall not hedge. I shall not play for safety. It's everything on the
favourite this time."

"You'll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he's got
his knife into you," returned Sibley.

"Not yet." Crozier smiled sardonically.

"Well, I apologise, but what I've said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to
man. You're ridin' game in a tough place, as any man has to do who
starts with only his pants and his head on. That's the way you begun
here, I guess; and I don't want to see your horse tumble because some
one throws a fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a
new country--jealousy, envy."

The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
the other, said warmly: "I'm just as much obliged to you as though I
took your advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge
to return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance."

"Well, most men get chances of that kind," was the gratified reply of
the gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the
doorway of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned
in brave disappointment a little while before.

Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the
British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions
present