reaking forth spontaneously like an oily rag in
the sun. At any rate, his fat face grown hectic, he lifted hand and
voice, shouting:

"I will have no women gambling here. This is my place, a place for
men. You," and he leveled his forefinger at the slim figure, "go!"

She ignored him. Stepping forward quickly, she whipped off her left
glove and in the bare white fingers, blazing with red and green stones
set in golden circlets, she caught up the dice cup. Even now little
was seen of her face for the other hand had drawn lower the wide hat,
higher the scarf about the throat.

"One die, one throw for it all, Senor Kendric?" she asked.

"I tell you, No!" shouted Ortega. "And No again!"

Then, when she stood unmoved, her air of insolence like Ruiz Rios's,
but even more marked, Ortega burst forward between the men standing in
his way, shoving them to right and left with the powerful sweep of his
thick arms. His uplifted hand came down on her shoulder, thrusting her
backward. Her ungloved hand, the left as Kendric marked while he
watched interestedly, flashed to her bosom, and leaped out again, a
thin-bladed knife in the grip of the bejewelled fingers. Ortega saw
and feared and, grown nimble, sprang back from her. Quickly enough to
save the life in him, not so quickly as entirely to avoid the sweep of
the knife. His sleeve fell apart, slit from shoulder to wrist, and in
the opening the man's flesh showed with a thin red line marking it.

There was tumult and confusion for a little while, hardly more than a
moment it seemed to Kendric. He only knew that at the end of it Ortega
had gone grumbling away, led by a couple of friends who no doubt would
bandage his wounded arm, and that the woman, having put her knife away,
appeared not in the least disturbed. He knew then that while men
talked and shouted about him he had not once withdrawn his eyes from
her.

"One throw?" she was asking again, the voice as tender, as vaguely
disquieting to his senses, as full of low music as before. He shook
himself as though rousing from a trance.

"I do not play at dice with ladies, Senora," he said bluntly.

"Did you bluff, after all?" she asked curiously. She seemed sincere in
her question; he fancied a note of disappointment in her tone. It was
as though she had said before, "Here is a man who is not afraid of big
stakes," and as though now she were revising her estimate of him. "Men
will call you Big Mouth," she add