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There was a world of difference between a cardplayer and a gambler.

A cardplayer hated the game as the hours drew on. He hated how the green baize of a playing table became a gnarled briar patch to the touch. He hated the sour scent of sweat, hated it more when it was his own, hated it most when it dried and turned to vinegar and became all you could smell.

Kon had been a cardplayer once. He remembered the hatred. It didn’t surprise him. He recalled being both starving and not hungry at all—the stomach rebelled at the prospect of food, but the tongue craved the taste of anything but stale saliva. And, deeper still, the smell, the pervasiveness, the bone-deep and nauseating awareness of one’s own greed, solidified so thickly that it was like a physical lust.

Even if you didn’t believe that money was the root of all evil, you’d be the closest to believing it then, all the grubby dollar bills and tarnished coins forming untidy piles like the heaping pus of a boil.

But that was then. Now Kon was a gambler and he loved the slow autopsy of the game, cutting away frivolities to reveal character. And then those same sharp knives took character as well. He knew the result as a scientist knew a chemical formula, as a chef knew a recipe. His avarice was finely pointed, yes, but not insurmountable. Like a collared hound, it worked at the beck and call of his intellect.

Other men weren’t so fortunate. They paid Kon to reveal this to them.

The game had started out with four. Carter, an ex-Confederate and sot who still wore his gray coat. The cards to him seemed a curiosity he tried to interest his hands in, but their abiding focus was a full glass. Oddly, the liquor didn’t make him reckless. He hung onto life by being timid as a church mouse, despite his boozy hiccups, and folded hand after hand like he was made of paper.

Then there was Bernice—a plump, nice-looking girl who fancied herself a poker player. She’d been cleaned out quickly, which was a shame, because Kon was just getting to appreciate her company. But business was business and pleasure was pleasure and they mixed often enough as a matter of course that Kon didn’t see the need to force them together.

Finally, there was Ben Curry. An unusual fellow. He dressed well and his cheeks were soft as a baby’s bottom, speaking of a hot shave. His blue-black pompadour wouldn’t have been out of place in the courts of Europe.

But he was a ruggedly ugly cuss, with the eyes of a starving dog, and with every good hand he brayed a nasty laugh and every bad hand made him crush venomous oaths between gritted teeth, completely betraying the class he laid claim to.

Yet he had money. Enough money to win him an early lead and then to keep going through a run of bad luck that set on him like the evening sun.

He made a few valiant efforts to break Kon’s stranglehold on him, but still took enough losses to know in no uncertain terms that Lady Luck would not be courted that night. But a peevish ill humor kept him at it, losing first coins to Kon, then bills, then his pocket watch, jeweled tiepin, then markers so big that Kon would’ve expected them from a bank, not a gentleman.

It must’ve been between four and five on the other side of the clockface that Kon decided to call it quits. A little meanness was the price of survival in the West, but forcing more blood from this stone would just be cruel. He began sorting that battlefield of double eagles and paper money into something a man of only two hands could transport.

“It’s almost the cock’s crow,” he said. “I think I’ve won enough money off you for one night.”

“Like hell!” Curry snapped. “You gotta give me a chance to win back my money.”

“I’ve been giving you chances,” Kon replied. “Same way clouds keep giving men the chance to jump up and grab ‘em. I’ll let you sober up before I call in your markers. Wouldn’t want to put you off drink altogether.”

Curry persisted the same way a bad cold went on and on: “You’re yellow!” he barked. “I’ve been figuring out your game all night and now that I’m about to bust you, you’re turning tail on me!”

Kon sneered. He knew he shouldn’t bandy words with someone drunk on defeat, but thunderation, it used to be that when you beat someone, they had the common courtesy to lose their smug look and know who the better man was!

“We could keep this going until the trumpet sounds, with you writing markers for all the gold in Fort Knox, but at a certain point, all the use those markers are ever gonna see is wiping my backside. So I’ll take what money you do have and thank you kindly, because having the winning hand on you has just lost all appeal to me!”

“I’m good for it.” Curry coughed, a strange look in his eyes like sanity was almost prevailing, then he reached into his jacket.

Kon tensed his arm, ready to work his derringer out from his sleeve and into his hand. He never used any sharpie tricks like shaving cards or hiding aces, but in case anyone said he did, the tiny gun at the crock of his elbow was more than enough to settle any argument from the other side of a poker table.

Curry came out with a pouch of red velvet, dropping it in the middle of the table. Kon reached to examine it, using his left hand, so his right was still free to aim the derringer if needed.

At the last minute, Curry thought better, or at least a second time. He opened up the pouch himself. Inside… Kon blinked thrice. Was that glass? No, ice chips?

Diamonds. A handful of diamonds, some as small as pinheads and some as big as peanuts. Kon tried to think of how much that must be. It was hard to tell without a loupe and with memories of his father’s jewelry store growing faint, but…

He understood why Curry had opened the bag himself. If Kon filched just one of those…

“I’d like to see one.”

Curry grinned smugly, almost igniting Kon’s pique on how the man just couldn’t admit defeat. But that was his brain talking. His greed was drawing the map now.

“So you’re not done playing,” Curry leered.

Kon crooked his fingers. Carefully, with a precision that Kon always wished his dentist had, Curry plucked one of the diamonds from the bag and set it far enough down the baize for Kon to pick up.

Kon held it to the highball glass his mint julep had come in. The diamond readily cut a scratch in the glass. It was real, alright. And assuming the rest were, and assuming the quality was even average… Kon was looking at fifty thousand dollars.

His mind whirled. More than enough to see his entry into the high-stakes tournament in San Francisco and enough juice to punch his way out of it too. The pot would run into the hundreds of thousands—he might be a bona fide millionaire by the time he had the city on the back of his jacket.

Put that in the bank and his money troubles were over, permanently. He could play the stock market… buy an oil field… or just travel the West, still playing poker, but now knowing that there was always a steak dinner and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon waiting when he desired it.

Heaven on Earth.

Kon tossed the diamond back to Curry. “It’s still late and a growing boy like me yet needs his sleep, so let’s make this quick. Every penny I’ve won and every marker I’ve taken against those diamonds.”

Curry had the ugliest smile Kon had ever seen produced with a full set of teeth. “Agreed.”

“Too rich for my blood,” Carter wheezed, throwing down his cards.

No shit, Kon thought. He pushed his winnings back into the center of the table, like he was building a shrine around that pouch and the wealth that would buy him his future.

They were all gravy. That pouch held the meat.

Curry laughed like a fuse burning down, like Kon had just shoved all that money right into his billfold. He slapped his hand down and almost broke the table. “Full house, fives over kings! You stupid son of a bitch, you thought you had me!”

Kon tried not to let his smile be too big. It might break his mouth.

He laid out his cards like he was planting a garden. “One queen. Two queens. Three queens.”

Curry watched each lady drop on the baize like it was a fire spreading to every room of his family home.

“Four queens,” Kon finished, and Curry had nothing to say to that. Not a sound in the world could he make.

But Kon knew that in the very near future, Curry would try to take his life.