came out?" he demanded solemnly.

"You were probably losing," I said.

"I was winning."

"Then you got tired of winning."

But he held up a thumb within a few inches of my face, and with it a ring
I had often noticed, a huge opal which he customarily wore on the inside
of his hand.

"She's dead," said Mr. Cooke, sadly.

"Dead?" I repeated, perplexed.

"Yes, she's dead as the day I lost the two thousand at Sheepshead. She's
never gone back on me yet. And unless I can make some little arrangement
with those fellows," he added, tossing his head at the smoke, "you and I
will put up to-night in some barn of a jail. I've never been in jail but
once," said Mr. Cooke, "and it isn't so damned pleasant, I assure you."
I saw that he believed every word of it; in fact, that it was his
religion. I might as well have tried to argue the Sultan out of
Mohammedanism.

The pipe belonged to a tug, that was certain. Farrar said so after a
look over his shoulder, disdaining glasses, and he knew the lake better
than many who made their living by it. It was then that I made note of a
curious anomaly in the betting character; for thus far Mr. Cooke, like a
great many of his friends, was a skeptic. He never ceased to hope until
the stake had found its way into the other man's pocket. And it was for
hope that he now applied to Farrar. But even Farrar did not attempt to
account for the tug's appearance that near the land.

"She's in some detestable hurry to get up this way, that's flat," he
said; "where she is, the channel out of the harbor is not forty feet
wide."

By this time the rest of the party were gathered behind us on the high
side of the boat, in different stages of excitement, scrutinizing the
smoke. Mr. Cooke had the glasses glued to his eyes again, his feet
braced apart, and every line of his body bespeaking the tension of his
mind. I imagined him standing thus, the stump of his cigar tightly
clutched between his teeth, following the fortunes of some favorite on
the far side of the Belmont track.

We waited without comment while the smoke crept by degrees towards the
little white spindle on the tip of the point, now and again catching a
gleam of the sun's rays from off the glass of the lantern. And
presently, against the white lather of the lake, I thought I caught sight
of a black nose pushed out beyond the land. Another moment, and the tug
itself was bobbing in the open. Barely had she reached the deep water
beyond t