One entered first a long, low room, lighted with three smoky lanterns, where the roulette game was. Above the table was a sign which read: "_Please do not get on the roulette table with your feet._" It was a vertical wheel, not a horizontal one, bristling with spikes which caught a flexible steel strip and finally stopped the wheel opposite a number. Each way the table extended twelve feet, always crowded with at least five rows of small boys, peons, and soldiers—excited and gesticulating, tossing a rain of small bills on the numbers and colors, and arguing violently over the winnings. Those who lost would set up terrible screams of rage as the croupier raked their money into the drawer, and often the wheel was quiet for three-quarters of an hour while some player, who had lost ten cents, exhausted his vocabulary upon the treasurer, the owner of the place and his ancestors and descendants ten generations each way, and upon God and his family, for allowing such injustice to go unpunished. Finally he would take himself off, muttering ominously: "_Á ver_! We shall see!" while the others would sympathetically make way for him, murmuring: "_Ah! Que mala suerte!_" Near where the croupier sat was a worn place in the cloth with a small ivory button in the center. And when anyone was winning largely at the wheel the croupier would press this little button, which stopped the wheel where he wished, until the winner was discouraged from playing further. This was looked upon as perfectly legitimate by all present, since, _carramba!_, there is no sense in operating a gambling house at a loss! The most amazing diversity of money was used. Silver and copper had long since been forced out of circulation in Chihuahua because of revolutionary hard times. But there were still some Mexican bank-bills; besides those there was _fiat_ money, printed on ordinary writing-paper by the Constitutionalist army, and worth nothing; scrip issued by the mining companies; I.O.U.’s; notes of hand; mortgages; and a hundred different _valés_ of various railroads, plantations, and public service corporations.