Butler's Wager

Начало книги

Tyrone Butler stared at the three aces in his hand and kept his face completely blank. He’d learned a hard lesson years ago not to let your hand show on your face. He’d spent a lot of years playing losing poker before he got the hang of it. Now he was confident that there was no one in the world who could read him.

“How many, Mr. Butler?” the dealer asked.

Butler plucked the mismatched cards from his hand and dropped them facedown on the table.

“Two.”

The dealer slid two cards across the table, then turned his attention to the next player. Now down to four players, the crowd of people around the table leaned in. The game had attracted more attention as the night went on, and as the stakes got higher. There had been many poker games in the Gold Room over the years but, of late, Wichita—like Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge City, and others—had fallen on hard times. Once they had been booming destinations for cattlemen and gamblers, but now the action had moved further west. Even several years ago, at the end of the 1870s, newspapers like the Wichita Eagle and the Dodge City Times were sounding the death knell for these towns. These days they were inhabited more by farmers than anything else. That was why the men in the saloon were happy to have something to watch, even though only one of the four men was a well-known gambler.

Читать дальше →