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Eight, red. Seventeen, black." It was almost like the boys in a broker's office calling off the quotations of the ticker and marking them up on the board. Leaning forward, almost oblivious to the rest, was Percival DeLong, a tall, lithe, handsome young man, whose boyish face ill comported with the marks of dissipation clearly outlined on it.
P.S. Please keep this confidential at least from my son Percival. "Well," said Kennedy, as he handed back the letter, "O'Connor, if you do it, I'll take back all the hard things I've ever said about the police system. Young DeLong was in one of my classes at the university, until he was expelled for that last mad prank of his.
Stanley, commissioned to solve the mystery, by the same America journalist who sent DeLong into the Arctic, had cut his path through the savages and the jungle, until at the door of a hut in a clearing, he saw a white man who could be none but him whom he sought, for in all that dark and gloomy forest there was none other of white skin. Then Anglo-Saxon stolidity asserted itself.
DeLong had taken a sort of grim pleasure in the fact that Kennedy, too, was losing. I found that Craig had paused in his play at a moment when DeLong had staked a large sum that a number below "18" would turn up for five plays the numbers had been between "18" and "36." Curious to see what Craig was doing, I looked cautiously down between us. All eyes were fixed on the wheel.
How long after these words were set down DeLong too died, none may ever know; but when Melville, whom Nindemann and Noros had found after sore privations, reached the spot of the death camp, he came upon a sorrowful scene.
The wheel spun, the ball rolled, and the croupier called again, "Seventeen, black." A tremor of excitement ran through the crowd. It was almost unprecedented. DeLong, with a stiffed oath, leaned back and scanned the faces about the table. "And '17' has precisely the same chance of turning up in the next spin as if it had not already had a run of three," said a voice at my elbow. It was Kennedy.
Of course what I say applies only to roulette when it is honestly played DeLong would lose anyhow, I fear." I started at Kennedy's tone and whispered hastily: "What do you mean? Do you think the wheel is crooked?" "I haven't a doubt of it," he replied in an undertone. "That run of '17' might happen yes. But it is improbable.
Just before the expedition started from Rockland it was remarked in conversation that the boat crew under DeLong, in the ill-fated expedition of the "Jeanette", met their death by starvation in the delta of the Lena, with the exception of two, Naros and Nindermann, simply because their hunter, Naros, had only a rifle with ball cartridges, the shot guns having been left on board the "Jeanette;" that on the delta there was quite an abundance of small birds which it was almost impossible to kill by a bullet and even when killed by a lucky shot, little was left of the bird.
"You talk like a professor I had at the university," ejaculated DeLong contemptuously as Craig finished his disquisition on the practical fallibility of theoretically infallible systems. Again DeLong carefully avoided the "17," as well as the black. The wheel spun again; the ball rolled. The knot of spectators around the table watched with bated breath. Seventeen won!
Before the smoke had cleared and order had been restored, Craig exclaimed: "Let him up, Walter. Here, DeLong, here are the I.O.U.'s against you. Tear them up they are not even a debt of honor." The Great K.& A. Train Robbery Any one who hopes to find in what is here written a work of literature had better lay it aside unread.
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