But Smithie laughed, shook his head, and slid the coin over toward his own chips. “No, sir. I’m goin’ to keep it—awhile, anyway.”
“So you do think it’ll bring you luck, after all!”
“No. But I’ll hold onto it for this evening, anyhow.”
“Not if we clean you out, you won’t,” said Charlie Loomis. “You know the rules o’ the ole shack: only cash goes in _this_ game; no I. O. U. stuff ever went here or ever will. Tell you what I’ll do, though, before you lose it: I’ll give you a dollar and a quarter for your ole silver dollar, Smithie.”
“Oh, you want it, too, do you? I guess I can spot what sort of luck _you_ want it for, Charlie.”
“Well, Mr. Bones, what sort of luck do I want it for?”
“_You_ win, Smithie,” one of the other players said. “We all know what sort o’ luck ole Charlie wants your dollar for—he wants it for luck with the dames.”
“Well, I might,” Charlie admitted, not displeased. “I haven’t been so lucky that way lately—not so dog-_gone_ lucky!”
All of his guests, except one, laughed at this; but Collinson frowned, still staring at the marked dollar. For a reason he could not have put into words just then, it began to seem almost vitally important to him to own this coin if he could, and to prevent Charlie Loomis from getting possession of it. The jibe, “He wants it for luck with the dames,” rankled in Collinson’s mind: somehow it seemed to refer to his wife.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Smithie,” he said. “I’ll bet two dollars against that dollar of yours that I hold a higher hand next deal than you do.”
“Here! Here!” Charlie remonstrated. “Shack rules! Ten-cent limit.”
“That’s only for the game,” Collinson said, turning upon his host with a sudden sharpness. “This is an outside bet between Smithie and me. Will you do it, Smithie? Where’s your sporting spirit?”
So liberal a proposal at once roused the spirit to which it appealed. “Well, I might, if some o’ the others’ll come in too, and make it really worth my while.”
“I’m in,” the host responded with prompt inconsistency; and others of the party, it appeared, were desirous of owning the talisman. They laughed and said it was “crazy stuff,” yet they all “came in,” and, for the first time in the history of this “shack,” what Mr. Loomis called “real money” was seen upon the table as a stake. It was won, and the silver dollar with it, by the largest and oldest of the gamesters, a fat man with a walrus moustache that inevitably made him known in this circle as “Old Bill.” He smiled condescendingly, and would have put the dollar in his pocket with the “real money,” but Mr. Loomis protested.