When Maggie looked over at Clint, she didn’t seem very worried. Almost certainly, she’d caught sight of the same thing that Mason had. One by one, she studied the other men. Finally she let out a haggard sigh and tossed her card onto the pile of discards. “You all can fight for it,” she said. Now that she was out of it, Maggie allowed herself to relax. When she leaned back in her chair, she looked up and caught Mason staring at her.
She brushed a few stray wisps of hair from her face and kept her eyes on him.
As much as Mason wanted to keep her in his sight, he wasn’t about to be distracted in one of the oldest ways known to mankind.
“Raise,” Greeley announced in the same tone of voice he’d used when adding fifty dollars to the pot. This time, however, he shoved six hundred toward the middle of the table.
Having a rich man try to buy a pot wasn’t new. Having someone like Dan bump it up again without so much as a flinch, on the other hand, was enough to raise more than a few eyebrows.
“You sure you wanna do that?” Greeley asked.
Dan chuckled nervously. “Would you let me pull it back in if I said no?”
Greeley let that go without a word and shifted his gaze toward Mason.
“I’d like to take a stab at this,” Mason said. “But I’m guessing one of you would only try to steal the buttons from my suit.”
“You’re out, then?” Greeley asked impatiently.
Sliding his hold card away like a child refusing to eat what was left on his plate, Mason said, “That’s right.”
“Take it,” Clint groaned.
“That leaves me, does it?” Greeley said.
Dan shifted in his seat. “Unless there’s another player sitting here that I haven’t seen yet.”
“You make that full house?”
“Even if I didn’t,” Dan replied, “what I got beats the trash you’ve got on the table.”
“Depends on what I’m holding here,” Greeley said as he tapped the card that lay facedown in front of him.
“Yes,” Dan said calmly. “It most certainly does.”
Chapter 7
Mason tried to read Dan’s face as if he were the one faced with Greeley’s decision. As with a scholar studying any subject, it was always a good idea to partake in hypothetical problems when he wasn’t hip deep in the real thing. Thus far, Dan had presented himself as a typical cautious player: quiet, conservative, predictable. Mason hadn’t allowed himself to be lulled to sleep by that, but he hadn’t seen much of anything to refute it either. Now Dan was taking a bold step.
If he was bluffing, he was doing a fine job of it.
If he had a hand, he was committing himself to it wholeheartedly like a captain running several paces in front of his men with saber drawn during a charge.
Either of them was an impressive sight to behold.
Greeley took a deep breath and began sorting his chips. First he cut off enough to cover the raise. He looked at that for a few seconds, looked up at Dan, and then looked back down again. Next, he started slicing off smaller pieces of his pie. As each little pile of chips joined the call, Greeley scowled as if he were letting go of a beloved pet.
Everyone at that table knew it was an act. Mason was certain of that much. If any of them truly thought the owner of the Delta Jack could be that concerned about money, they would have been plucked clean and hung out to dry long before now.
“I’m raising,” Greeley said.
“Obviously,” Dan snapped.
The quickness of Dan’s reply, combined with the inflection in his voice, gave Greeley a sliver of information.
After counting up the chips he’d sectioned off, Greeley took another stack and pushed them in to the middle of the table. “Two thousand more,” he said.
Without hesitation, and wearing a flicker of a grin that lasted for less than a heartbeat, Dan pushed everything he had in front of him. “And another twenty-two hundred seventy on top of it.”
Greeley didn’t know what to make of that.
Mason wasn’t so sure either. In fact, he hadn’t felt more grateful for anything in a while than he did for not having to be the one to make the decision that had just been put to the Delta Jack’s owner.
After staring at the chips Dan put in the middle of the table, Greeley said, “That’s not enough to cover a raise that size.”
“I have a line of credit here,” Dan said. “This may be putting me to my limit, but it should cover it well enough.”
“Credit?”
Dan blinked. “Yes. Credit issued by your cashier. You do still honor your own credit, right?”
“Of course I do,” Greeley said with an angry edge to his voice. At least, Mason thought it was anger. So far, he’d never heard the Jack’s owner when he was angry. He’d heard stories about such instances, which were enough to make him certain he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of it. Watching from a distance, on the other hand, was worth pulling the strings necessary to be invited to this game.
Keeping his eyes on Dan, Greeley raised one hand and snapped his fingers. One of the men guarding the table strode over to him like any well-trained attack dog. “Yes, Mr. Greeley?” he said.
“Have a word with Tilly,” Greeley told him. “Ask her how much credit has been extended to Mr. Andrews here.”
“Yes, sir.”
The guard turned and walked away. As he passed the other guards, he handed over his shotgun and kept moving toward a cage at the back of the room where the boat’s cashier and accountants performed their duties. Holding two shotguns instead of one seemed perfectly natural to the guard who remained behind.
Mason had to shift his focus back to Greeley. He would have assumed that Greeley knew the accounts connected to any of the players in front of him, but now he wasn’t so sure. Greeley seemed genuinely flustered as he tapped a finger against his chin while staring daggers at the man to his left.
As for Dan Andrews . . . it seemed he was close to dozing off for a spell.
For the next several moments, the only sounds to be heard were those that drifted in from the rest of the room. Other games were in full swing. Girls laughed at men trying to woo them. Drunks told jokes or groused about something or other. In one of the other rooms on the deck above, music was being played.
Glancing toward the closest window, Mason said, “Hell of a nice night out there.” His tone was friendly, but his voice came so suddenly that it hit the table like a brick tossed through a pane of glass. It might have been somewhat childish to purposely give the other players a start like that, but Mason simply couldn’t help himself.
Clint suppressed a chuckle, but just barely. “It sure is,” he said.
Maggie rolled her eyes.
Dan chuckled under his breath while idly drumming his fingers against the table.
Greeley leaned back and crossed his legs. Although he wasn’t being so obvious about staring at Dan, he was still studying him.
It was easy enough for Mason to track the guard through the rest of the room. The man had a bulky build, but that wasn’t what caused everyone he encountered to step politely back to clear the way for him. Even from a distance, Mason could feel the relief pouring out of those folks once it was clear that the man in the infamous gray suit wasn’t coming for them. Mason had suspected that all the guards at that game were overmen and now he felt comfortable in changing that suspicion to a certainty.
When he arrived at the table, the guard collected his shotgun and walked straight over to Greeley’s chair. “Seventeen hundred and seventy, Mr. Greeley,” he said. “That’s how much credit is left on his account.”
Greeley didn’t insult the other players by trying to make it look as though that was any sort of revelation to him. He merely nodded.
“Tilly wanted to know,” the overman continued, “if the credit should be suspended.”
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“No need for that,” Greeley replied.
“She also wanted to know if you wanted it extended.”
With the lilt of an eyebrow, Greeley passed that proposition over to Dan.
“One hand at a time,” was all Dan had to say to that.
Suddenly Greeley’s mood seemed to improve. That was undoubtedly a surface affectation, but it was a good one all the same. “A smart way to live, sir,” he declared. To the overman standing nearby, he said, “I’ll let you know if Tilly needs to be informed of anything else. Run along, now.”
Dismissing the overman as if he were shooing away a lapdog was even more impressive than any other display thus far. Mason, along with anyone else at that table, didn’t need to be reminded of the guns at Greeley’s disposal, but it was quite another matter to be shown firsthand.
Mason shifted his weight, careful not to make any noise.
“Your play,” Clint said. Perhaps he’d wanted to show he wasn’t frightened by the muscle being flexed by the overmen nearby, but it was still out of turn and Clint knew it.
Greeley would have been well within his rights to put Clint in his place, but he didn’t. All he needed to do was snap his eyes across the table for a second and Clint backed down with an apologetic shrug.
Times like these were why Mason preferred to play from the position of a man who simply knew what he was doing and had a decent amount of funding to back it up. Being someone with Greeley’s stature brought with it a whole other set of concerns. If he looked weak, there were any number of sharks in the water poised to take a bite out of him. If he looked heavy-handed, some of the more delectable fish in the water might get frightened away and leave him hungry.
If Greeley folded, he could look weak. Even worse, if he folded and Dan showed a bluff, Greeley would look like a fool.
If Greeley called and Dan was bluffing, he would look brilliant while Dan would be reduced to ashes. If Greeley called and Dan wasn’t bluffing . . . well, that wasn’t very favorable for a man in Greeley’s line of work.
It was a tricky quandary, which was why Mason intended to retire someplace quiet once he pulled together enough money to call it a fortune instead of buying his own casino.
“You want me to call?” Greeley asked.
Dan continued drumming his fingers. Expecting him to jump at the chance to answer that question was hopeful on Greeley’s part. Despite the cynical nature of gamblers, they were still strangely hopeful in a desperate situation.
Finally Greeley made his decision. “What the hell?” he declared. “It’s only money. I call.”
At that point, Dan wasn’t about to string Greeley along. He tipped his hand to Mason before showing his hold card, however, when he glanced over to the row of overmen stationed a scant number of paces away from the table. Not that Mason could blame him. If he was about to take that much money away from someone like Cam Greeley, he’d be nervous too.
Dan flipped over his card. It was the six of clubs, which gave him a full house.
“I’ll be damned!” Clint said.
One corner of Maggie’s mouth turned upward as if she was not only seeing Dan in a new light, but enjoying the sight.
Mason was impressed as well but preferred to keep that fact under his hat for the moment.
“Nicely done, sir,” Greeley said.
Graciously Dan replied, “Thank you.”
“I had suspicions that you were holding something good, but I just had to see for myself.”
“I understand. Done the same a few times myself,” Dan said while raking in his pot.
“Would you like the balance credited to your account or would you prefer cash?”
“Credit will be fine, Mr. Greeley. I know you’re good for it.”
Greeley barely had to shift in his chair to summon an overman. When the scary fellow stepped up to the table, Greeley reached into his jacket pocket for a small notebook bound in leather. “Take this to Tilly,” he said while scribbling on the pad with a little pencil. “Have this amount added to Mr. Andrews’s account.”
The overman took the piece of paper and folded it in half without looking at what had been written on it. He then turned and made his way through the crowd once more to the cage at the back of the room.
Even as he stacked all those chips while surely thinking about all the credit being written beside his name in Tilly’s ledger, Dan barely cracked a smile. He seemed satisfied, but not overly so. Pleased with himself, but not to the point of arrogance. As Mason watched him, he knew he’d misread that man in a big way. He was just happy that it had been Greeley and not himself at the end of the move that had just been made.
“Let’s deal the next game,” Greeley said while clapping his hands together anxiously. “Next round of drinks is on me. Sorry to keep you all waiting during that last hand.”
“No hard feelings,” Clint said. “That was a hell of a show.”
Mason had to concur with that sentiment. In fact, he was certain things would only get better from there.
Chapter 8
The next couple of hands went fairly well. Obeying one of the many unspoken rules in poker, Dan kept his head down and mouth shut for a while after taking such a large pot. Clint was happy just to be in the game again, which loosened his purse strings a bit. Greeley played the part of a good host and consoled himself by attempting to gain some ground with Maggie. Since she wasn’t interested in either of the men beside her, she kept her eyes pointed straight ahead. Mason was sitting right there in her line of sight, happy to be the lesser of the table’s evils.
Just to test the waters, Mason raised a hundred dollars based solely on the pair of nines in front of him. He had nothing in his hand and there were still two cards left to be dealt, but Dan and Maggie were already out and neither of the other two men had cards showing that could beat a pair.
“Raise,” Clint announced as he pushed in just a bit too much money.
“I’ve got a few matters to tend to,” Greeley said. He pitched his cards and stood up. “I won’t be long. Care to join me, Maggie?”
“You want me to join you while tending to business matters?” she asked.
“Pleasure,” he said while opening his arms as if to embrace his entire boat, “is my business. And it would be my pleasure for you to join me.”
Greeley had been drinking along with everyone else and could very well have been playing up his intoxication, but any man with a pulse would have made a similar offer to Maggie if he was in Greeley’s shoes. To her credit, she did a very good job of spurning his advances when she said, “I’ve still got a lot of ground to cover to make up my losses. Maybe some other time?”
“Most definitely.” With that, Greeley left.
It wasn’t one of the larger pots of the night, but Mason wound up taking it by calling Clint’s ill-advised raise. “Anyone care to change things up a bit?”
“What’s on your mind?” Clint asked.
“How about a few hands of draw instead of stud?”
“Sounds good to me. I could use a change of luck. Anyone else have any objections?”
It was Dan’s turn to deal and he gathered up the cards to start shuffling them. “No objections from me.”
“What about you, Maggie?” Mason asked.
“I don’t like draw,” she said.
“Maybe you just haven’t given it a chance. You know, it’s unfair to judge something unless you’ve given it a try. I may be able to open your eyes to some things you’d quite enjoy.”
Scowling to let him know that she was aware he wasn’t just talking about poker, Maggie said, “I think I’d rather take my chances with five-card draw.”
“Suit yourself. Danny,” Mason said while lifting his hand in a mocking tribute to the way Greeley summoned his overmen, “you may deal when ready.”
Dan shuffled one more t
ime and then started flipping the cards out one at a time.
Collecting his cards under one hand, Mason perked up a bit when he saw the row of overmen all turn toward a central point. He couldn’t see what they were looking at, but he could hazard a guess. “Looks like we’ve got another player coming,” he said.
“About time,” Clint grunted.
“Did you know someone else was due to arrive?”
“No, but there’s been an empty chair beside me all night long and I figured someone was bound to fill it.”
“Good,” Maggie sighed. “Maybe that’ll make it harder for you to leer at me whenever you think I’m not looking.”
“If you didn’t want a man looking, you shouldn’t give him so much to look at.”
Maggie’s neckline did drop to an enticingly low point, and the bodice of her dress most definitely hugged her figure in a way that could be distracting. Rather than do anything to cover herself up, she turned her head while running the tip of her tongue along her bottom lip and said, “I’m only interested in interesting men.”
“What about rich men?” Dan asked.
She, as well as Clint and Mason, was surprised to hear such a bold comment coming from someone who’d been content to remain so quiet. Mason raised his glass to him and said, “A fair question, sir!”
Maggie looked at him with a warmth in her eyes that could melt butter. “Rich and soft-spoken. That’s an irresistible combination.”
“Eh, just deal the cards,” Clint groused.
The other three at the table had a good laugh while Dan finished his deal. Before taking a look at what he’d been given, Mason took another glance at what was happening with the overmen.
“Definitely another player,” he said. “And he seems to have passed muster.”
The others at the table all looked in that direction as the guards stepped aside to let the new arrival through. He was dressed in a suit that was well fitting, if not impeccably tailored. The brown bowler on top of his head was removed to reveal a short crop of light brown hair. His having just endured a vigorous search, his jacket was open and slightly rumpled. Mason couldn’t see any shapely girl with a silver tray of weaponry, so he guessed the slender gambler had come to the game unarmed.
Ralph Compton Straight to the Noose Page 5
