“You remember I went to Butte after we had lived there awhile. I used to go there sometimes from Denver when my funds were low. It was my field, where I reaped a golden harvest from the miners, for I was an expert at the kind of play for money common among them. I was not known there by my right name. I was Tom Crary, the professional gambler, and I played for high stakes, and to win. On my last visit I met a young man from Washington with piles of money, and no end of conceit as to his methods of play. He had been successful a few times, and, inflated with pride, challenged me to a trial of skill, telling me I must keep my eyes open if I played with him. He was from the East where the people were up to the times. He said a good deal more in the same strain and evidently looked upon us all as a species of heathendom. It was easy to take his measure, while something about him attracted me. He was different from most of the men with whom I had dealt, and I felt a strange unwillingness to play with him. But he insisted, and at the first sitting I let him win a few hundreds, and said I was too tired to go on. I knew he would come for me again, and he did the next night, more conceited than ever and ready to stake any amount I pleased to name. “Something prompted me to try to dissuade him from playing. I might as well have talked to the wind. I was afraid, he said, with a sneer which decided me, and we sat down, with a number of men around us whose faces I see so often in my dreams, just as I see his, flushed and eager at first, then anxious and pale, but still determined as the game went on, and I won almost continually. I meant business this time, and gave him no quarter until he was nearly cleaned out for that night, and I was the richer by thousands. “He was not, however, discouraged. His luck would turn, he said, and if it didn’t he could stand it, and the next night he came for me again, with the same result. Still, he did not lose his courage, and the third night found us again sitting face to face with something in his expression which reminded me of a young Englishman I once saw at Monte Carlo, playing desperately, while the sweat stood in great drops on his forehead and around his mouth. The next morning he was found dead behind a clump of shrubbery in the grounds of the Casino, and was buried in a suicide’s grave. My opponent was like him, young, handsome and determined, and his face grew whiter and the sweat drops larger as the night went on, and my pile increased while his lessened, until he declared himself ruined and arose from the table.