ike your recent friend, the
Frenchman with a system. This is what you have been up against, my
boy. Look."

His forefinger indicated an 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 favor 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. There
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
non-magnetic. It is simply a soft iron hollow ball, plated with
platinum. Whichever set of electro-magnets is energized 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 d