Chapter 13

THE SECOND ATTACK was against Joshua alone, but Jason always wondered whether the motivations for that attack were robbery, or something else.

“You have no idea,” sighed Sarah Gay, “how good it feels to be walking around in the daylight, like a normal person.”

Rare sunlight filled the city, turning San Francisco into a world of glass. The sparkle on the bay was almost blinding, the wings of the gulls flashing like distant pieces of mica, unbelievably bright against the blue. The air was cool and damp, and the smell of the sea filled the city with the strange wild yearning of far-off winds.

Joshua, walking beside her across the mud of Van Ness Street, felt there could be no more happiness in the world.

She sighed, the habitual look of worried exhaustion washed from her face by the light. “I feel positively wicked and abandoned, leaving the people at the hospital to fend for themselves this morning.”

Josh smiled quietly. “I spend my nights in gambling halls and dens of iniquity, and here I am walking out with a wicked and abandoned woman from St. Brendan’s Charity Hospital.”

She laughed. They had left the city behind them to the east, where it clustered around the dizzy roll of its hills. Below them lay the sand dunes and rank sea grasses of the north end of the point, that grew below the heights. “And is it working?” she inquired, holding her petticoats clear of the sand as they climbed along the crest of the hills. “This mathematical system you have come to San Francisco to try. I understand that fortunes are lost by men who have systems.”

“That isn’t the fault of the systems themselves,” said Josh. “Mathematics will always work if you are precise enough. It’s just that most people’s arithmetic isn’t up to the concepts. Ishmael Marx is the only man I’ve met whose grasp of mathematics is such that he can make such a system work. And it is working. It’s just that it works slowly, and that’s the burr under Jason’s saddle. He wants it quick and colorful, and mathematics doesn’t work that way.”

“Ah.” Sarah smiled. “And that is the secret of gambling palaces and dens of iniquity. That something as precise and structured as the mathematics of the games themselves is hidden under a layer of jewels and brocade; and that most men see only the lights and brightness. Which is why the house wins. Aside,” she added in mock disapproval, “from the copious amounts of strong drink served on the premises.”

Joshua laughed again, and gave her his hand to help her over the rough ground. “You’ve got it there. But how would you know about dens of iniquity?”

She raised one curved brow over an eye cool and gray as rain. “You think respectable women are the only ones who fall ill?”

Joshua was silent for a time, walking in step along the crest of the heights, thinking about those brightly painted ladies in their gay silks. He knew how he felt after less than a week of this nocturnal existence, of the noise and the kaleidoscope of bright and dark, of waking in the afternoon and sleeping in rooms curtained to cut the sunlight through the day so that he might go back to that world of brightly colored night. Like the slender woman who walked beside him, he felt a kind of refreshed relief at being about in the daylight.

What would it be like to have to live that way all the time? To know the sun only as something you swore at when it leaked through the shades and woke you at four in the afternoon? The thought made him sick with weariness. He, at least, knew that he could go back to Seattle in time. Those ladies with their false smiles and their paint that covered the spoor of weariness had nowhere to go.

They found a boulder to sit on, at the crest of a particularly high hill. For a time they sat in silence, the city spread out below them and to their right, vast and jumbled, like the mounds of cracker boxes and paper thrown out behind a grocery store. At the waterfront the ships crowded at anchor, white sails furled like the wings of resting ducks; along the rocks by the Golden Gate the waves made tiny patterns of white against the slate color of the sea.

“Why did you become a nurse, Sarah? How did you go into that?”

She glanced over at him, the pale sunlight glinting on her spectacles, then looked away. She started to speak, changed her mind and sighed, as though deciding to trust him against a nature that did not easily trust. “I’m not really a nurse,” she said. Her long hands were wrapped around her knees, and he could see that the backs of them had already begun to knot with manual toil. The long black tendrils of her escaping hair brushed her cheeks like cloud trails. “I’m a medical doctor. I read medicine under my Uncle David back in Philadelphia, and passed my examinations.”

Joshua regarded her with considerable surprise. “A doctor?” And unbidden he remembered Sarah’s wry smile at his own and Aaron’s surprise when Ish had suggested it.

She nodded, and continued to look out over the city and the bay. “Does that shock you?”

“It’s just that I—I didn’t know women were allowed to be doctors.”

“They’re not.” Her voice was thin and clipped. “It’s perfectly legal—but it isn’t really allowed.”

“Hunh?”

She sighed, and turned to him with a trace of bitterness lingering on her smooth, wide lips. “If you were hurt, or ill—would you go to a man doctor, or a woman?”

He laughed uncertainly. “I’d go to any doctor I could find.”

“But if you had a choice? Of several male doctors, or a woman?”

He hesitated, putting in mind his own automatic reactions. “I—uh—I don’t know.”

“Well,” Sarah said, “I do.”

To his shame Joshua knew she was right.

She went on, “That’s why I came here to San Francisco. I was naive enough to hang out my shingle in Philadelphia. I was run out of business in a month. Oh, nobody wrote me threatening letters, or burned my house, or anything like that. But—weeks I’d sit, day after day in my consulting room, and no one would come. I applied for residency at the city hospitals and they assumed that I wanted work as a nurse—and offered it to me in the face of my medical creden tials. They all seemed to find me a little amusing.”

She sighed, and began her futile and never-ending task of readjusting her hairpins, tucking in the trailing ends of her hair, which were perpetually escaping from the darkness of the main mass. “Well, I came to San Francisco. I thought there were few enough doctors in this town that perhaps I might stand a chance of doing what I wished to do, of healing others and learning about the arts of healing.” She shrugged. “I was wrong. Maybe in a town this size in the East I might have stood some chance, if there were so few doctors. But the town is still mostly men, and a man has to be in extremis before he’ll let a woman near him with a scalpel in her hand. Your friend Ishmael is the only man I’ve met to whom it would even occur that a woman could be a doctor. Most of my patients in Philadelphia were women—those whose husbands would trust me with them, which weren’t many. Women are thin on the ground, here.”

She avoided his eyes, and tugged at the long weeds that grew in the cracks of the rock on which they sat. Her profile seemed to him thin and delicate, but those big hands were strong. They caressed the leaves of the weed she held more lightly than the wind. “So now I work as a doctor at St. Brendan’s, though my title is Nurse. Dr. Killian knows, and Sister Sheila, but even if the board of directors of the hospital would sanction the hiring of another practitioner—which they won’t, in spite of the volume of the work—they’d naturally hire a man.” She shrugged again. “In any case I’m doing medical work, and I suppose it’s all I can hope for at the moment.”

Joshua took her hands in his. “What a waste. People are stupid. Sarah, I—”

She disengaged one hand, and touched a finger to his lips. “No, Joshua,” she said quietly.

“But I—” he began, and she shook her head.

“I am what I am, Joshua. I am what I will be.” Her eyes were gentle, understanding his words before he spoke them, knowing what he would say, and why. “I am a doctor, Joshua, and a woman in a man’s business right now. Don’t offer me the—respectable—womanly—alternative of marriage, for I would only turn you down.”

He was silent, looking into her eyes with nothing to say. To have offered her marriage as an escape from striving would have been an insult, both to her pride and to her abilities, but the closing of that door stabbed him with a sudden pang of grief. He knew now that he wanted her—suspected that it had been so since he had first met her earlier that winter at the boardinghouse. And now he could not ask for her.

After a moment he sighed. “People are stupid. I think you must be a fine doctor.”

“Because you find me fair to look upon?” Her voice was teasing, but her eyes were not—not entirely.

“Because you’re honest,” he said. “If you weren’t good, you’d be too honest to try and fight the tide.”

The slightly baiting look relaxed into a genuine smile. “Thank you.”

He helped her to her feet. “Will you still have dinner with me tonight?”

She laughed. “Of course. It’s rare enough that I am asked to dine with a gentleman, even one who does spend every spare evening he has in gambling dens.”

“Good. I’ve told my brothers I’m taking a vacation. I’ll come for you at eight.”

She shook her head with mock dismay as they wound their way back down the hills. “Playing hookey from the gaming halls. I fear you are incorrigibly respectable, Mr. Bolt. I—what is it?” For Joshua had stopped as they passed the lee side of a hill, and was looking at the loose, sandy soil with a puzzled expression.

He reached down and brushed the smoothed depression with his fingers. “Someone’s been here,” he said. “For quite some time, it looks like, and very recently. Look, the kicked sand on the edge of these tracks here hasn’t even settled.”

Her lips tightened a little, but she only said, “So someone was here. We said nothing that could not have been overheard in mixed company—except for the shameful nature of my profession, that is.”

Josh straightened up, and shook his head, as if trying to dismiss the thought. “But why would anyone have taken such pains to come and go quietly, so quietly neither of us heard?” He frowned, remembering what Jason had said at the outset of their adventure, about not going about the city alone; remembering also the incident on Kearney Street the other night. He scanned the silence of the hills around them. “I don’t like this,” he said at length. “Let’s get back to town. I’ll see you at eight.”

“Got it!” Jason exclaimed, with an explosive crack of his fingers that made Jeremy halt in mid-motion of loosening his cravat and look over at him in the fashionable crimson gloom of the hotel suite.

“Got what?” Jeremy pulled off the red silk cravat and threw it on the sideboard, and began systematically emptying money out of his wallet and coat pockets onto it. The coins sparkled, gold and silver against the blood red of the silk and the shining black walnut beneath it, bright in the glow of the elaborately shaped lamp at his elbow. The curtains of the suite were, as usual, shut; even had they been open nothing but a wall of charcoal gray dawn fog would have been visible beyond. It was five-thirty in the morning, and cold as the Devil’s icehouse.

“Those two fellows I saw in Florinda’s Place the other night, remember?” Jason knelt by the well-laid wood in the hearth, and began scratching lucifers on the hearthstone to light it.

“I remember you spending half the evening fretting over where you’d seen them before.” His tone was good-natured. Jeremy was long familiar with his oldest brother’s memory for names and faces, and knew that nothing drove him so crazy as not being able to place where and when he’d seen someone. It was part, he supposed, of Jason’s impulse to control things—the same impulse that made him so curious about Ishmael Marx. “Are we g—going out to breakfast or do we send for it?”

“They were the two fellows who came through Seattle last September,” said Jason, ignoring Jeremy’s question in the pursuit of his own mysteries. “You remember, Jeremy. They were dark and kind of strange-looking. I got the impression they were looking for someone—they asked a hell of a lot of questions. …”

Jeremy shrugged, and went to warm his hands before the young blaze on the hearth. “You g—got me.”

Jason frowned at this defection. “It was at Lottie’s.” He pursued the issue. “Maybe you were over at the dormitory. Josh was there, he’d remember … I think that was a little before your time, Ish.”

“D—does it matter?”

“Not really. I just wonder if they ever found the fellow they were looking for.” Jason got to his feet, and prowled restlessly back to the sideboard, beginning to stack and count the coins that his youngest brother had left scattered in such carelessness. “San Francisco would be the place to find someone, though. Everybody on the Coast comes through San Francisco, if you wait long enough. What’d you say about breakfast?”

“I suggest that we go out.” Ishmael glanced up from his own silent brooding over a pageful of mathematical calculations that he’d made while observing the Wheel of Fortune. “It will take at least an hour to warm this room to acceptable temperatures, and there are better ways of passing the time than shivering over our coffee.”

“Shall we wake up Josh, then?” Without waiting for an answer, Jeremy strode to the door of the room Ishmael and Joshua shared, his brown eyes sparkling with the relish younger brothers always feel about rousting their seniors out of warm beds on cold mornings.

Jason laughed. Ishmael began, “I hardly see that …”

Jeremy came back into the parlor. “He’s not there,” he said, puzzled. “His bed hasn’t been slept in.”

Jason elevated his eyebrows and whistled suggestively. Jeremy shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like Josh.”

“Little brother,” Jason said, laying a patronizing arm over Jeremy’s shoulders, “I ought to tell you a few facts about even that most respectable of men, your brother and mine …”

There was a deferential tapping on the door of the suite. The brothers and Ishmael exchanged an inquiring glance, and Ish rose to his feet and limped to answer it.

It was a hotel porter, a stocky middle-aged man with red muttonchop whiskers, wearing the brass-buttoned livery of the hotel staff.

“Mr. Bolt?” he asked, his eyes going from Ishmael to Jason and Jeremy. “Mr. Joshua Bolt?”

Jason stepped forward, “I’m Jason Bolt,” he said. “My brother is out at the moment.”

The man nodded, seemingly untroubled by the fact that Mr. Joshua Bolt would be out at that hour of the morning. “Well, sir, there’s a lady downstairs asking after Mr. Joshua Bolt.”

Jason cocked an eyebrow at Jeremy and grinned with ribald triumph; Jeremy shook his head impatiently and demanded, “Did she give her name?”

“A Miss Gay.”

It meant nothing to Jason or Jeremy, but Ishmael said, “Is she in the lobby?”

“Yessir. Said she was on her way to work.” His opinion of women who worked was patent in the inflection he laid on the word said.

“I shall go down.” Ishmael handed the man a coin, and disappeared into the gaslit gloom of the corridor. As the porter turned to go Jason lifted a hand to stay him, and handed him another few coins.

“As long as Ish is going to be entertaining Joshua’s lady-bird, we might as well send for breakfast after all.”

Sarah Gay looked up quickly as Ishmael entered the lobby, and her normally severe face relaxed into a smile when she saw that it was someone she knew. Her plain, dark blue calico with its white collar looked somber and drab in the opulence of the Palace, which had been decorated, as the management was not backward about pointing out, with the finest of furnishings that could be brought around the Horn. Ishmael privately considered the dark crimson velvet of the wallpaper, the purple plush upholstery of the thickly carved furniture, the prism-encrusted chandeliers and perpetually velvet-shrouded windows as a particularly successful exercise in bad taste, but could not for the life of him remember what he had been brought up to think of as good taste. As when he had searched the woods in company with Aaron and Biddy, he had the sensation of almost being able to touch some different and unheard-of thing, aesthetic in this case instead of technological.

Then the feeling was gone, and he dismissed the question from his mind as he bowed. “Miss Gay.”

“Mr. Marx,” she said, without preamble, “please don’t think that I’m trying to pry or meddle, but was there some reason Joshua Bolt couldn’t leave the hotel last night?”

He raised one eyebrow. “On the contrary, Miss Gay. He left it at about seven-thirty, saying he had plans of his own for the evening. He has not returned.”

Her eyes lowered briefly to her gloved hands, which rested, folded, upon her knee. The delicate line of her mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that,” she said quietly. “He was supposed to come for me for dinner at eight.”

They agreed that it was best to split up, Jason and Jeremy checking the police stations, Ishmael and Sarah the hospitals. “There’s no way of checking the third alternative,” said Sarah quietly, as she and Ishmael strode along the clammy dawn streets, their cloaks stirring at the fog that still clung to the corners of the buildings like ectoplasmic wool. “In any case the tide’s turned.”

Her cool voice did not fool him. Long used to reading the subtlest cues to hidden emotion, he glanced sideways at her, remembering what she had once said about the crimps that operated in any deep-water port.

“Surely there are far too many sailors in this city for professionals to kidnap an obvious amateur such as Joshua?”

She shook her head. “It depends on how many ships are in port short of hands. There’s ways of finding out, but none that would do him much good if he’s already on an outward bound vessel. The whole of the Barbary Coast is honeycombed with subcellars and tunnels, almost as bad as Chinatown. Anything could have happened to him. I …”

From the fog a shape materialized, and a man’s voice said, “Aha, Dr. Gay! We were just coming to seek you, but recognized your voice.”

Much to Ishmael’s surprise, Miss Gay halted and curtseyed to the man who emerged from the fog of a narrow street. “Your Majesty,” she said. “Mr. Marx—permit me to present you to His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, and his two dogs, Bummer and Lazarus.”

Ishmael, who remembered very clearly Aaron telling him that the United States was ruled by a president and a democratically elected Congress, looked in some puzzlement from Miss Gay to the slender, dignified Englishman in the tattered crimson military uniform and flowing cloak who stood so haughtily before them amid the vegetable parings and horse droppings of the gutter. The aforementioned dogs—a pair of shaggy curs, one big and one small—slunk back snarling, and the Emperor Norton snapped his fingers peremptorily.

“Sirrahs, behave yourselves! You do us no credit.” He turned back to Sarah, and bowed again. “When I passed the hospital the other day I saw you with a young gentleman. Since you have in the past done me many kindnesses, when I discovered that same young gentleman this morning lying unconscious in a doorway in Chinatown …”

“What?” cried Sarah, her usual cool poise deserting her as she caught at the elaborately braided sleeve.

The Emperor of the United States put a kindly hand over hers. “There, there, my dear. We assisted him to the home of some friends of ours in the district, then came to seek you. We were fortunate to find you so quickly.”

“Take me there,” said Sarah.

Joshua lay on a straw pallet in the back room of a noodle factory off Washington Street—a room whose broken windows had been mended with scraps of rotting cardboard but which was warmed by the steam from the kitchens next door. Ishmael glanced curiously around him as he and the Emperor of the United States escorted Miss Gay in from the noisome alley outside. The dozen or so Chinese who occupied the place all bowed as they entered, but he had the sensation of being observed by watchful eyes. There were several other pallets in the room, and the signs of occupancy by at least half a dozen; from the covered trapdoor half-hidden in the shadow in a corner his quick ears caught the vague sounds of movement underground.

“Please do not think that your young man is drunk, Dr. Gay,” the Emperor Norton was saying. “I am completely familiar with the smell of alcohol, and there is none upon him. I am more inclined to believe he has been drugged.”

She knelt beside Joshua’s limp body, pulling back the velvet evening cloak that covered him, and one of the Chinese put in, “He not have poppy, either. No smell, no smoke.” He shook his head and bowed, a thin ageless-looking little man with a long pigtail shot with white. “If he sleep in opium den, he no have cloak after, either.”

“He has a point,” agreed Ishmael, kneeling beside Sarah to feel Joshua’s wrists. “Nor are his clothes damp. He would not have lain in the doorway long.”

“Nothing on his breath,” said Sarah, leaning over Joshua to sniff at his lips. “Not alcohol or opium.”

“There was nothing in his pockets, either,” added the Emperor, still standing among the cluster of Chinese at the door. “We sought for some means of identifying him, as all we knew was that he has walked you home from St. Brendan’s these last four evenings. I thought he’d been slugged, myself,” he added, less formally, “but there’s no lump.”

Sarah leaned forward, carefully lifting Josh’s head and gently felt the back of his skull. She shook her head, puzzled, and lowered his head to the thin pillow again; then she brushed the ivory blond hair back from his temples and frowned.

The Emperor leaned over her shoulder to look. “What would have caused that?”

Sarah frowned. “Burns, it looks like.” She glanced up swiftly, hearing the harsh draw of Ishmael’s breath. “What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

In the dim daylight that came in from the alley his face looked taut; one hand was pressed to his temple, and perspiration gleamed thinly on his upper lip. But he shook his head, and the pain—if it was pain that he felt—seemed to pass. “Nothing,” he said quietly, “Nothing.”

On the cot Joshua moved convulsively; his eyes flew open in unseeing panic and he cried, “I won’t!”

Sara caught at his flailing hands. Joshua struggled against her for a moment, then gasped and lay still, his face shining with a dew of moisture. Quietly, Sarah asked, “You won’t what, Josh?”

He opened his eyes again, blinking up at her stupidly. Then with a faint moan he moved his head. “I won’t what?” he asked. “What are you—Sarah—I mean, Miss Gay—where am I?” He moved his head to look past them at the dim door with its crowding shapes, and groaned again.

“You are in the Yee Han Song Noodle Factory on Washington Street,” provided Norton.

“What? Aargh,” he added, as another pang lanced through his skull. “How did I get here? I …”

“Joshua,” asked Ishmael quietly, “what happened? The …” He paused, realizing how insane it sounded. “The Emperor of the United States found you about an hour ago on the outskirts of Chinatown, unconscious. Do you remember what happened?”

He tried to shake his head, and quit with a gasp. He gasped again when he tried to bring his hands to his throbbing temples, and touched the blistered squares of flesh there. “No,” he said faintly. “Nothing. It’s like—like it never happened. The last thing I remember was walking out of the hotel to meet Sarah—I mean Miss Gay,” he corrected himself. Then, “Who found me?”

“I’ll explain later,” whispered Sarah reassuringly.

From the corner where he stood Ishmael watched them, the lunatic emperor in his gaudy uniform and the elderly Chinese, Sarah sitting on her heels and feeling Joshua’s pulse with calm competence, the dim light reflecting like monster eyes off the lenses of her spectacles. His own head ached with a sharp stab of remembered pain. He put his hand to the small, square scars that marked his own temples, and reflected that Joshua was lucky to remember anything at all.

*

“And a two for the gentleman.”

“Hit me.”

“And a queen for the little lady.”

“Hit me.”

“And eight lovely clubs for the gentleman.” The dealer’s eyes, dark and cold as a shark’s, gleamed flatly from a smiling face. “Bets up, folks, who’ll buy another round?”

The gaslight gleamed soft and white above the tawdry blazon of the cards. One in the morning, the long drag end of the night. Joshua Bolt, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ishmael in the doorway to the billiard room, felt he’d lived his entire life in gambling dens. The tiredness he’d felt, walking with Sarah on the hills above the bay nearly a week ago, had grown to an all-encompassing sense of exhaustion. He felt it had been years since he’d seen daylight. Bridal Veil Mountain, the place they were doing all this to save, seemed like some far-off dream. But a dream close enough to touch, close enough that he could hear the unending whisper of rain on the pine needles, and the throaty clucking of the black, ice-choked stream that ran five feet from the kitchen door.

He glanced sideways at his companion in this combine of mathematics and glitter. Despite the shirtsleeves and rumpled hair, Ish looked capable of playing pool for the rest of the night. Jason was right. The man was inhuman.

Jeremy, faithful to the system, had folded on nineteen. Jason was still in, but if the card he pulled next round was three or over he must fold. And he did. They’d been losing all night.

That was the hardest, Joshua knew. The times they stuck with the system and lost. Even harder was to refrain from betting everything when the odds were that they would win, in order to recoup. Since his own interest in cards was almost entirely mathematical he knew that this was how it must be, but he knew that there was enough of a gambler in Jason’s more extravagant makeup that every loss, especially the close ones, or the ones that could have been wins, rotted his soul.

It had, Josh knew, little to do with the money. Watching the angry glitter in his older brother’s eyes, he knew this to be true without understanding it. Jeremy could win or lose with reasonable equanimity; the brief elation over his wins balanced the annoyance over his losses—and in any case in some things Jeremy was longer-headed than Jason. Jeremy could accept Joshua’s and Ishmael’s guidance and stick with the tedium of the system. Jason’s bolder nature fretted under the restraint.

And it didn’t help, Josh reflected, that they’d been losing for two days.

It was all in the odds, of course. He and Ishmael had explained it to Jason, and Jason had claimed to understand. But Josh didn’t like the glint in Jason’s eyes as he threw down an eighteen.

Behind them in the billiard room a man’s voice grumbled, “Damn kid’s game. Not a man’s game in the place.” The speaker intruded his wide shoulders between Ish and Joshua; a big man dressed in black clothing a bit too dandified for a rancher, a knight’s head stickpin glinting in the dark silk of his cravat. The smell of whiskey hung faintly about him, but there was, too, an edge of danger, a readiness for trouble that said, Gunfighter.

At the blackjack table, Jason leaned forward, his red-and-gold waistcoat bright as blood against the white of his sleeves. He looked at his cards, leaned back, and folded.

Behind them, the big man grumbled, “About as much skill and thinking as Faro. Spit in the Ocean! Acey-Ducey Under-My-Shoosie! Doesn’t anybody in this Godforsaken hell play chess?”

Without so much as turning his head, Ishmael inquired, “At how much a piece?”

Mate was set at two hundred dollars. Queen went for a hundred (“About the price of any woman in this town,” remarked someone), rooks seventy-five, bishops and knights fifty. Pawns were twenty dollars apiece. A mystified owner scoured the surrounding saloons for a chess set and finally came up with one that the owner of Florinda’s Place kept for decoration in her parlor.

Ishmael beat the stranger in seven moves.

“By God!” roared the big man. “Let me see you try that again, stranger!”

He caught him with a reverse fool’s mate, in three.

“But that,” he said, pocketing his cash, “is a classic fakement.”

The big man stroked his narrow black mustache and regarded his closed-in king thoughtfully through a haze of cigar smoke. Then he looked back up at Ish. “After I beat you this time,” he said, “show me that one again.”

Warned, stung and $600 poorer, the gunfighter settled down to grim play. Joshua stayed in the corner of the billiard room with the little knot of spectators who knew enough about chess not to be bored to distraction, watching the slow progress of the game. The man in black was no slouch; he studied every move carefully before he made it, working through in his mind possibilities that Ishmael clearly saw three and four moves ahead. Yet it was clear to Joshua from the outset that Ishmael would win.

In time the concentration was almost palpable in the air, like a vibration or a slowly intensifying light. There were less than a dozen spectators—an oddly assorted lot including two of the house gamblers, a dancehall girl in red silk, a rancher from Virginia City, a scruffy little man in checked pants who looked like a drummer and a thin cowboy in a trail-worn green shirt—and they were mostly silent. Occasionally the owner would come in, shake his head in mystification, and go out again to mind the progress of the gaudier pastimes in the gambling rooms outside.

Someone touched Joshua lightly on the arm. Jeremy’s voice whispered, “What the hell are they up to?”

“Chess,” said Josh.

Jeremy glanced past him at the tableau of still forms in the flickering halo of the gaslight, then back at his older brother. “Josh, listen. Do you have the rest of the money on you?”

That got Joshua’s attention. “Why?”

“Jason’s luck has turned—he’s winning, and winning big. He’s d—doubled what we came in with tonight; he must have picked up fifteen thousand dollars since he sat down, and it seems like the more he bets, the more he wins.”

Joshua frowned, not liking the sound of this. “That isn’t what he’s supposed to be doing.”

“But it is, Josh! He’s going with his luck. It’s what we came here for.”

Joshua hesitated, and glanced back toward the unmoving circle around the chess players. Neither had stirred, nor had any member of their small audience.

Josh’s mind raced, trying to decide what would be best. Ishmael had said that the essence of the system was not to be panicked, either by losses or by wins. Looking at that hawk-like profile bent over the hieratic ivory figures on the board, he wondered if Ish had understood how high gambling stakes could run. There were, Josh had discovered, some odd gaps in his friend’s knowledge; curious, inexplicable areas of ignorance, and an odd sort of naiveté. Joshua had no doubt that he understood the mathematics, but he suddenly wondered if Ishmael fully comprehended the human element of the game.

As he handed over the wallet containing their $8,000 reserve and watched Jeremy slip quietly away into the gambling rooms, he felt a sensation akin to panic intrude itself into the portion of his anatomy just above his watch pocket. At this time of night—it was now nearly three in the morning—the gambling rooms had an air of unreality anyway, ascribed by Ishmael to the cumulative effects of oxygen deprivation and nicotine poisoning. The colors seemed more intense through the blurring of blue cigar smoke, the noisier roar of the early night muffled down, with only an occasional, disjointed fragment of the dealer’s voice coming through it, or a man’s exclamation of triumph. Joshua left the group around the chess-game and made his way to the scrolled archway that led into the gambling room.

One glance told him that Jeremy hadn’t been exaggerating. Jason sat in the middle of a small crowd, his red-brown hair tousled and falling into his eyes. Gold was stacked elbow-deep all around him; the glitter of it wasn’t as bright as his eyes. He was riding his luck, and that, more than the aura of the gold, seemed to hang about him like a halo of fire—he was a man on a winning streak, twisting Fate into victory.

But what Jeremy hadn’t said was that Jason had changed his game. He was no longer playing blackjack, but poker.

“Raise,” said Jason in an emotionless voice, and Joshua felt his heart stop. It started again, racing—numbers would work in blackjack, a game of numbers played against the house’s numbers. Poker was as unpredictable as the men who sat around the table: a calm-eyed gambler, a couple of ranchers, and a mining-man from Virginia City. The little money had all long since been run out of the game.

There was the soft, flat pat of folded cards thrown in. Jason scooped the money toward him; Joshua saw him smile.

At his elbow, Jeremy’s voice whispered, “He’s hot, Joshua. He’s magic tonight. They c—can’t stop him.”

Joshua threw a despairing glance over his shoulder. In the brief gap between watchers he got a slim vision of Ishmael, brooding over the chessboard like an Egyptian cat-god. He looked back in time to see Jason draw two, raise, and raise again. And still he won.

It was like being in a nightmare, watching events in which he was helpless to interfere. Josh quickly calculated the sum on the table at Jason’s elbow—about twice their total capital, some thirty thousand dollars. His brother was grim, the sweat trickling, shining, down his face, playing with an unerring instinct that was in itself almost a system. He was taking chances he couldn’t possibly have taken, and winning, running the sum on the table up higher and higher and always getting away with it. Hypnotized, Joshua knew that was their entire fortune riding on those cards, riding on Jason’s instinct, on that mysterious thing called “feel.”

A harsh voice spoke in his ear, breaking the dreamlike spell. “What is he doing?” It was Ishmael, his face like something carved from rock.

“He’s winning,” said Joshua self-evidently, but his voice was shaky.

“He is gambling.” Behind that neutral, expressionless tone that masked so much, Joshua could tell that Ish was profoundly shocked. “He has decided to trust his instincts, rather than the mathematics of the system.”

“He has damn g—good instincts,” said Jeremy softly, from Josh’s other side. Jason stood pat, and won on three sevens; drew three cards on the next hand, and won again.

The stakes went up. There was close to thirty thousand on the table—Jason raised, and won. There must have been other noises, from the billiard room and the saloon, from the other tables. Joshua was conscious of none of them. He watched in horrified fascination as Jason disregarded every precept, every system, took chance after chance—won hand after hand. We’re going to do it, thought Josh. We’re going to win the money, buy out our bet, go home …

The weird elation went like fire through him. The closed-in room seemed hot beyond bearing; all the world was concentrated in the brilliance of the golden gaslight, and the glitter of the money; in the black-and-red magic of the cards. Jason drew two, and raised; one of the ranchers folded, the other met and raised. After a momentary, enigmatic scrutiny of his cards, so did the gambler.

“Stand,” whispered Joshua desperately. “Stand, for God’s sake.”

Jason raised a second time. The gold seemed to blaze like a mountain of fire in the lamplight. In a quiet voice, the gambler said, “Raise,” and pushed forward the rest of his own pile, the equal to what Jason had left.

Josh whispered, “Fold on it …”

Jason, after a moment’s thought, silently pushed forward the glittering stacks of gold.