Skip got off the bus in Reno, checked his suitcases in the station, and went out at once to look the town over. He had never been in Reno, though he knew it was different in some ways from Las Vegas. There was no Strip, for one thing, no long arm of luxury hotels and casinos stretching toward sucker-land in California. Reno lay close to the High Sierras, the Donner Pass country, and it seemed at once more of a frontier town and at the same time more compact and sophisticated, like a city. Once inside the gambling clubs, however, the resemblance to Las Vegas was startling. Here were the same vast ranks of slots, the identical green tables, craps, roulette, twenty-one, the same clang of coins and, for Skip, even the same faces, the expressionless know-nothing masks of players and club employees alike.

Skip turned in one of the hundred-dollar bills at the cash­ier’s cage, getting tens in exchange. He went to a crap table, watched the action for a couple of minutes, then tossed three of the tens across to the dealer, who stacked thirty silver dollars in front of him. Skip put five dollars on the line. There were about a dozen men at the table. The shooter was an old fellow with the withered, weather-worn look of a desert rat. On his first shot he threw a seven and Skip’s money was increased by five. Skip let it ride, added ten. Again the old fellow threw a five and a two. Skip withdrew his winnings on some psychic impulse, fortunately, for the old fellow crapped out on his next throw.

Skip went to the next table. When he finished there he was more than five hundred dollars to the good. Feeling hungry and thirsty, he headed for the café at the rear of the club.

In the cashier’s cage the assistant manager was counting and examining the money taken in and took a second and longer look at Skip’s hundred-dollar bill. He nodded to the girl cashier. “Wait a minute. Something I want to check.” He took the bill with him, went to a door set flush on the wall, touched a button, and waited. In a moment he was admitted to an inner office, a steel-lined room built like a vault.

He took an FBI flyer from a desk drawer and began to study numerals on it and compare them with the numbers on the bill.

In the café Skip had just been served a New York-cut steak, Caesar salad, whipped Idaho potatoes, fresh green peas, and coffee royal. He ate dreamily, looking at the Gold Rush murals painted around the walls.

Eddie said, “Look, it’s nearly five. I’m going to knock off.”