Basil shrugged his shoulders. "What is the use?" he said briefly. "I have been nervous enough up to the present, but now the moment has arrived I have just _got_ to keep cool. The biggest strain is on me, and if I fail now all our plans are over and it means"--he threw out his hands with a foreign gesture--"well, we won't talk of what it means."

"You are marvellous!" said the excitable little Frenchman. "You have no tremor, no compunction."

Basil shook his head. "I am strung up to go through with it," he answered, "and take what comes--fortune or prison. As for compunction, it seems to me a good deed to rob the proprietors of this h.e.l.l if one can, considering all the stories I have heard during the few hours I have been here, and the evil pa.s.sions I have seen displayed on all sides. And, moreover, we do it for the sake of science, to confer an inestimable benefit on the world!"

"_Bien_," Deschamps answered. "Now, have you got the card absolutely safe? Let's compare it with mine for the last time."

From out of his pocket Basil drew an oblong slip of card. Upon it, written in a cypher invented by himself and Deschamps, in which they had perfected themselves during the last week or two, were a series of numbers. Above each number was marked the time--9:5, 9:15, etc., etc.

They went through the cards together finding them to correspond in every detail.

"And now for the watches," said Deschamps. From a kit bag in the corner of the room he produced a leather case, containing two handsome gold chronometers. "I have kept them there until now," he said, "in order that they might not become magnetised by the electric work I have been doing."

With the utmost care and nicety he adjusted the timepieces so that they did not vary, one from the other, by a single second. Then he gave one chronometer to Basil, and returned the other to the portmanteau.

"I have been playing all the day," Basil said, "with the hundred and fifty louis we reserved for that. Sometimes I lost, sometimes I won. But I spread my money about with supreme indifference. Always I put down a maximum stake, and I played upon a number. Of course, I lost many times, but I am sure I gave the desired impression to the croupiers at our table where the marked wheel is, that I was a wealthy gambler indifferent as to whether I won or lost. Towards the end I had a stroke of luck. I had put nine louis on 7, and 7 turned up. So that I won 6,300 francs. I had heard that the rule forbidding all tips to the croupiers had been recently abrogated; so that I feed the men in my neighbourhood magnificently. I shall get a seat at our table all right if I am punctual when the Casino opens for the evening play."

"And what are you going to do now?" Emile asked anxiously. "Will you stay here with me?"

"I don't think so, _mon ami_," Basil returned. "We have worked out every possible detail. The more we talk about it, the more nervous we shall become. I shall go to my room, have a little fish and a single gla.s.s of wine, and then stroll round the gardens in the fresh night air until it is time to go in." He held out his hand. "Good luck, old fellow!"

Deschamps grasped it and nodded, too full of emotion and excitement to answer.

Then Gregory quietly left the room and descended to his own.

As he walked down the pa.s.sage he heard the click of the lock being shot into its place and knew that Deschamps would be alone with his machinery till midnight.

CHAPTER IX

Into the glittering rooms Basil Gregory strolled.

He had left the Hotel Malmaison but five minutes before. The metal check for his light coat and opera hat was in his waistcoat pocket, and as he walked slowly up the Atrium, smoking a cigarette, he seemed--even in an environment where some of the most important people in the world congregate--a very distinguished person indeed.

As he came up to the doors quick-eyed officials in their black frock coats--carrion-crows people have called them--made their bows and pushed open one of the great cedar portals.

Already the word had gone round that this tall and cool gentleman was an unknown millionaire, who was pleased to amuse himself for an hour or two at the tables.

Basil entered. People were still dining. The rooms were full--they always are full--but of the ordinary and hungry crowd who do little more than venture a few francs, and hardly dare take a chair at any table when one is vacant.

Basil sauntered up to the right hand table in the large central salon.

Some people call this table the "suicides' table," others give that sinister designation to another. Be that as it may, Basil found a chair and sat down--on the left of the croupier who spins the wheel and his colleague who sits behind him on a higher chair and directs the whole operations of the table.

Basil sat down, took out his watch and placed it upon the s.p.a.ce of green baize before him. Then he drew twenty or thirty gold coins from his pocket, and a couple of five hundred franc notes.

The official who sat above the man who turned the wheel smiled down at the newcomer. It was a slack time. The table was half deserted, the rush of the diners had not yet begun.

Basil took out his cypher card and placed it carefully behind a little rampart of gold coins.

The croupier spun, and before the "_Rien ne va plus_" was uttered Basil had shoved his usual maximum of nine louis upon number 3--sitting as he did close to the wheel which divided the two long tables.

Twenty-eight turned up. Basil saw his money raked away, with the few other stakes that were adventured, with a broad smile.

No one could possibly have noticed the quick glance he gave at his watch. But that glance signified to him that for the next five minutes number "11" would be certain to win.

He put the maximum upon number 11.

He glanced again at his watch, as the croupiers began to croak their "_Faites vos jeux_" and gazed moodily round the table, which was now beginning to fill up. At that moment--a supreme moment to him--he was conscious of no particular emotion at all.

When asked about it afterwards by a certain intimate friend he always said, "Really, I felt nothing whatever."

The weary yellow-faced slave of the wheel did his duties.

All the money upon the table, at that moment, was upon even chances, upon the dozens, the _transversales_, or the columns. No single person had played direct upon a number--a thirty-five to one chance.

The big triangles of red and black at the far end of the table were both piled with gold and notes, the borders of several numbers were covered with adventurous stakes.

There was a swift "click" as the ball went home.

Number 11 had turned up.

Basil Gregory had the impulse to rise from his seat and go striding up and down those glittering halls, hugging his secret, spurning those other players who knew nothing.

Everything had occurred exactly as he had planned with Emile Deschamps.

At the precise moment arranged between them the wireless message had come to the spinning ball and it had fallen, as it was directed, obedient to the unseen and unsuspected powers of science.

He drew towards him six thousand three hundred francs--two hundred and fifty two English pounds!

He looked at his watch again. The next slot in the wheel that was to be magnetised was 33. But it was not yet time. It had been arranged that he was to lose occasionally in order to divert suspicion.

He placed the maximum of nine louis upon zero. To his consternation, zero won. Again he received the enormous sum of six thousand and odd francs. He leant back in his chair, outwardly indifferent and calm, but throbbing in every nerve and pulse with wild excitement. It was true then!

A few hundred yards away, in the little bedroom on the roof, Emile Deschamps was pressing key after key with absolute precision. And as he pressed the little spinning ball, flung from the hand of the croupier, must perforce obey the invisible power that vibrated through the air.

That he had won upon zero--when he meant to lose--seemed only a minor incident in the riot of his progress.

The one man in the crowded halls of that palace--the one and only man--who could control Fortune herself, he sat there outwardly cold and impa.s.sive, while his mind and nerves were torn and wrenched as by opposing forces.

He was now more than five hundred pounds to the good, and as yet he had only played one coup of the many agreed upon by the secret code.

Already the people at the table were glancing at each other and at the impa.s.sive young man who staked a maximum each time, and had already won twice _en plein_--so unprecedented a thing to do.

He was a Russian prince, it was whispered. His French was so perfect--though it was not absolutely the French of a Frenchman--that the whispering people round the table thought he could be none other than a Russian. That he was English never occurred to anyone, for no Englishman speaks French as Basil Gregory spoke it.

The wheel was turning again, and everyone watched to see what the unperturbed figure by the croupier would do.