n ingenious, but now tangled and twisted,
series of minute wires and electro-magnets in the broken wheel before
us. Delicate brushes led the current into the wheel. With another blow
of his axe, Craig disclosed wires running down through the leg of the
table to the floor and under the carpet to buttons operated by the man
who ran the game.

"Wh--what does it mean?" asked DeLong blankly.

"It means that you had little enough chance to win at a straight game of
roulette. But the wheel is very rarely straight, even with all the
odds in favour of the bank, as they are. This game was electrically
controlled. Others are mechanically controlled by what is sometimes
called the 'mule's ear,' and other devices. You can't win. These wires
and magnets can be made to attract the little ball into any pocket
the operator desires. Each one of those pockets contains a little
electro-magnet. One set of magnets in the red pockets is connected with
one button under the carpet and a battery. The other set in the black
pockets is connected with another button and the battery. This ball is
not really of platinum. Platinum is nonmagnetic. It is simply a soft
iron hollow ball, plated with platinum. Whichever set of electro-magnets
is energised attracts the ball and by this simple method it is in the
power of the operator to let the ball go to red or black as he may
wish. Other similar arrangements control the odd or even, and other
combinations from other push buttons. A special arrangement took care
of that '17' freak. There isn't an honest gambling-machine in the whole
place--I might almost say the whole city. The whole thing is crooked
from start to finish--the men, the machines, the--"

"That machine could be made to beat me by turning up a run of '17' any
number of times, or red or black, or odd or even, over '18' or under
'18,' or anything?"

"Anything, DeLong."

"And I never had a chance," he repeated, meditatively fingering the
wires. "They broke me to-night. Danfield"--DeLong turned, looking
dazedly about in the crowd for his former friend, then his hand
shot into his pocket, and a little ivory-handled pistol flashed
out--"Danfield, your blood is on your own head. You have ruined me."

Kennedy must have been expecting something of the sort, for he seized
the arm of the young man, weakened by dissipation, and turned the pistol
upward as if it had been in the grasp of a mere child.

A blinding flash followed in the farthest corne