PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
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Complete unabridged public-domain literary work from the Project Gutenberg archive.
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Many French words in the text have accents, etc. which have been omitted.
CHAPTER VIII. A MASTER STROKE--Continued
There were a score round us when the fool, little knowing the man with whom he had to deal, and as little how to lose like a gentleman, flung the words in my teeth. He thought, I’ll be sworn, that I should storm and swear and ruffle it like any common cock of the hackle. But that was never Gil de Berault’s way. For a few seconds after he had spoken I did not even look at him. I passed my eye instead--smiling, BIEN ENTENDU--round the ring of waiting faces, saw that there was no one except De Pombal I had cause to fear; and then at last I rose and looked at the fool with the grim face I have known impose on older and wiser men.
‘Marked cards, M. l’Anglais?’ I said, with a chilling sneer. ‘They are used, I am told, to trap players--not unbirched schoolboys.’
‘Yet I say that they are marked!’ he replied hotly, in his queer foreign jargon. ‘In my last hand I had nothing. You doubled the stakes. Bah, sir, you knew! You have swindled me!’
‘Monsieur is easy to swindle--when he plays with a mirror behind him,’ I answered tartly.
At that there was a great roar of laughter, which might have been heard in the street, and which brought to the table everyone in the eating-house whom his voice had not already attracted. But I did not relax my face. I waited until all was quiet again, and then waving aside two or three who stood between us and the entrance, I pointed gravely to the door.
Arthur Conan Doyle
