The other man looked at him and gazed at the heaped pile of coins and notes which lay before him. He himself was no pale-blooded opponent, nor usually disposed to slight the opportunities of the game. "I don't understand," said he finally. "Certainly I am not willing to pledge my land and 'niggers,' like our friend from Belmont here. Perhaps my fall has been hard enough not to tempt me to go on with my sort of luck. Suppose I decline!" "You don't understand me," said Dunwody, looking him fair in the face. "I said that your stake can easily be equal with this on the table. I'll play you just two out of three jack-pots between the two of us. You see my stake." "But mine?" "You can make it even by writing one name--and correctly--here on a piece of paper. Full value--yes, ten times as much as mine! You are giving odds, man!" "I don't understand you." "You don't want to understand me. Come, now. You, as an army man, ought to know something of the history of poker in these United States. Listen, my friend. Do you recall a certain game played by a man higher in authority--younger than he is to-day--a game played upon a snowbound train in the North country? Do you remember what the stakes were--then? Do you recall that that man later became a president of the United States? Come. There is fine precedent for our little enterprise." The swift flush on the face of the other man made his answer. Dunwody went on mercilessly: "He played then much as you do now. There was against him then, as there is now against you, a man who admired not so much just one woman in all the world as, let us say, one particular woman then and there present. Perhaps you remember his name--Mr. Parish--later ennobled by the German government and long known as a land baron in New York. Come! Think of it! Picture that snowbound train, that great citizen, and Parish, playing and playing, until at last it came to the question of a woman--not so beautiful as this one here, but in her own way shrewd, _the same sort of woman_, I might say--mysterious, beautiful, and--no, don't protest, and I'll not describe. You remember very well her name. It was pleasant property not so long ago for everybody. They played for the _love_, not for the hand, of that woman. Parish won her. Do you remember now?" The younger man sat looking at him silently, his face now grown quite pale. "I am unwilling, sir, to allow any man to mention such details regarding the past life of my commander-in-chief, a president of the United States. It is not seemly. My profession should free me, by its very nature, from conversation such as this. My errand should free me. My place as a gentleman should free me, and her, from such discussion. It must, it shall, sir!"