lier
beat down on a big table in the centre of the room, round three sides of
which were ranged a dozen or fifteen men eagerly intent on the
operations of the banker. A heavy-jowled man with overhanging black
eyebrows, he was seated in a half-circle cut into the centre of one side
of the table. In front of him was a bright steel box sufficiently large
to contain a pack of cards with the face of the top card discernible at
an opening at the top. The cards were pressed upwards in the box by
springs, and at the side a narrow opening allowed the operator to push
the cards out one at a time, thus disclosing the faces of those
underneath and deciding the bets. On each side of the box were the
discarded winning and losing cards, and on the dealer's left a tray
which served the purpose of a till in receiving or paying out money. A
cloth with painted representations of the thirteen cards of a suit was
pinned to the table nearest to the players, and they placed stakes on
the cards they fancied would next be disclosed. Twice the box would
click out cards amid a dead silence. Those who had staked out money on
the first card disclosed won, those who had staked on the second lost.

There was often dead silence while the turn was being made, save for the
click of a marker shown on the wall and guarded by a thick-set little
man with red hair, fierce eyes, and an enormous chest. But directly
afterwards babel would break out, to be sternly quelled by the
heavy-jowled man.

"I 'ad set on sa nine," ... "Say, that king was coppered," ... "I ought
ter have split it."

The jargons of all the world met and crossed at such time. It was rarely
that there arose a serious quarrel, for Keller and his myrmidons had a
swift way of dealing with malcontents. When a man became troublesome,
the fierce-eyed little marker with the big chest would tap him on the
shoulder.

"That's enough, you," he would say menacingly.

If the warning were not sufficient the left hand of the little man would
drop to his jacket pocket, and when it emerged it would be decorated
with a heavy brass knuckle-duster. It took but one blow to make a man
lose all interest in the game, and thereafter he would be handed over to
the tender mercies of "Jim," a giant of a door-keeper, who after dark
would drop him into the street at some convenient moment, with a savage
warning to keep his mouth shut lest a worse thing befall him.

This was the place Heldon Foyle had made up his mi