The Desert Valley

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. Then he turned square about in his chair again and snapped out: 'Deal, can't you?' Longstreet saw that the boy's face was red; that his eyes burned malignantly.

'Hello, Barbee,' said the man in the newly opened door. He came fully into the room and closed the door after him.

'Hello, Courtot,' answered Barbee colourlessly.

With an effort Longstreet had withdrawn his analytic faculties from the consideration of the recent problem that had been solved for him by the cards themselves; now he was busied with collecting them, arranging them and getting ready to shuffle. Among the amused eyes watching him he was conscious of a pair of eyes that were not simply amused, the eyes of Jim Courtot. He looked up and took stock of the new-comer, impelled to something more exhaustive than a superficial interest by that intangible but potent thing termed personality. This man who had entered the room in familiar fashion through a back door and a rear room, was of the magnetic order; were he silent in a gathering of talking men he must have been none the less a conspicuous figure. And not because of any unusual saliency of physical attributes; rather for that emanation of personality which is like electricity--which, perhaps, is electricity.