al
courtesy. "Let us understand each other. Whenever I drink, I expect
you to do the same. As for you, Hunch, you'll kindly stay sober!"

Jokai gulped the nauseating torture to the end. He was faint and sick.
By the end of the third game, every move had become convulsive. The
insidious bite of the current was getting horribly on his nerves.
Still with desperate will he played on. Drunk and dizzy--his veins hot
and pounding, he stared in fascinated horror at the face of his
merciless opponent. Through the film of smoke it loomed vividly dark,
impudent, ironic, the mobile mouth edged satirically with a slight
smile.

"Are you man or devil?" he whispered.

Carl laughed. His hand, for all his drinking, was calm and steady, his
handsome eyes clear and cold and resolute.

"Hunch," he said curtly, "if you touch that bottle again, I'll break it
over your head. You're drunk now."

To Jokai his voice trailed off into curious nothingness. Somewhere he
knew in a room stifling hot and hazy with the fumes of vile tobacco
there was a voice, musical, detached and very far away.

"Monsieur," it was saying, "there are still the questions."

With shaking hand Jokai touched a metal king and screamed. The heat
and the hell-board hard upon his days and nights of enforced drinking
were too much. With a strangled sob, Jokai of Vienna pitched forward
upon the board unconscious.

Carl swept the metal men away with a shrug.

"Poor devil!" he said pityingly. "All this hell sooner than answer a
question or two. By to-morrow night, with another dose of the same
medicine, he'll feel differently. Likely I'll run up to Connecticut
to-night, Hunch, to see my aunt. I'll be back by noon to-morrow. Tear
off the window boards and give him some more air. You can move him to
another room in the morning."

Hunch obeyed, and presently as the street door slammed behind his
chief, Hunch's single eye roved expectantly to the forgotten whiskey on
the table. Jokai lay in a motionless stupor by the window. It would
be morning before the hapless drinker would be quite himself again.
With brutal, powerful arms, Hunch bore his charge to an adjoining room
and consigned him disrespectfully to a bed. Then with a fresh bottle
of whiskey in his hand, he returned to the open window, leered
pleasantly at the dizzy glare of city lights beyond and henceforth
devoted himself to getting very drunk. Having gratified this bibulous
ambition to the u