Collis, stimulated by the whisky and the noisy saloon, began to see the game in his mind with the brilliance of a kaleidoscopic picture show. This was his particular talent, and it had won him hundreds of dollars in New York faro games. He could imagine the whole pack of cards in his mind, like a brightly lit choir in their choirstall, and whenever one was played he could immediately picture it leaving the ranks, saying good night, and going off home. At any moment throughout the whole game he knew how many cards had been played and what they were, and so he knew which cards remained in the box. More than that, he could work out the odds on the order in which they were most likely to be played next.

It was impossible to predict which cards would be turned up as winning cards and which would come out as losing cards, and yet Collis believed he had a nose for that, too. Whether it was magic, or intuition, or self-delusion, he always felt that he could detect an underlying rhythm in the way the cards came out of the box, especially when he knew the dealer.

He had kept his bets down to thirty dollars on each card in the first game. As they came to the twenty-fourth winning card, three cards away from the end of the game, he had won two hundred and ten dollars and lost sixty.

‘Do you want to name ’em?’ asked the dealer, in a rusty voice, his eyes fixed unmovingly on Collis’s necktie.

‘Sure,’ nodded Collis. ‘One hundred fifty dollars says they’re king, deuce, jack.’

Charles and Andrew placed their bets, too. The dealer dealt out the king of spades, the two of diamonds, the jack of hearts. The usual house odds on naming the order of the last three cards was four to one. The dealer sniffed, tugged at his moustache, and then pushed across a pile of gold five-dollar pieces.

They played for four hours at the same table. At three o’clock in the morning, the Eagle was still crowded, the blue cigar smoke hanging in dense and suffocating veils, and the noise and laughter was even louder than before. The piano player, revitalised by a supper of ham and eggs, was thumping out marches and stirring Republican songs, while an old hardware-store owner with a bald head tried to demonstrate to his friends how he used to dance the quadrille with his late wife’s family. Outside in the street, there was the fiat sound of pistol shots, but they were too far away for the Eagle’s customers to be bothered.

Between Collis and the faro dealer a strange antagonism had grown up, a cold and uncomfortable atmosphere which both Charles and Andrew had obviously sensed as well. Collis had felt the man’s dislike for him when he had first sat down at the table, and had ascribed it then to nothing more than the natural hostility that most pioneers felt for slickly dressed Easterners. But as Collis had amassed more and more money on the table, the dealer had grown increasingly rigid and chilly in his manner, and his eyes hardly ever moved from Collis’s face.