"Why!" ejaculated the pretended Chilian, with admirably feigned surprise, "We two are left facing one another."
"So we are!" returned Mr. Gladsden, thinking, with all the possible mischances, he was more agreeably placed here _vis-à-vis_ with the gentleman of the night, than clinging on a bar outside the top of a tower fifty feet high.
"I was just going to ask the favour, Captain."
The other "captain" nodded and grinned under his long hook nose, to the banker and others at hand, as much as to say, "Now I have my gentleman precisely in the corner I have been driving him to."
"Will you venture all?" the highwayman leader returned in a mocking way.
"Why should I not? You have so far afforded me so much hearty entertainment that I am entirely at your disposal."
Don Aníbal made a grimace not unlike that when the marvellous shot had allowed the last speaker to drop out of the swing of his _navaja_.
"Even in case I risk the whole heap?" resumed Matasiete, laying his long fingers out on the pillar of gold coin before him.
"As your lordship desires, though it is a mistake."
"Because I am in luck's way lately," returned Mr. Gladsden, significantly. "You always lose pitted against me."
"Do you really think that run will last?"
"I am willing to wager on it," was the reply, in the determined tone of an Englishman to whom, indeed, a bet is the _ultima ratio_.
"_¡Caray!_" exclaimed the arch-bandit, piqued, "Your remark decides me, all goes on the _dos de espadas_, two of spades. Is it a go?"
The Spanish-Americans are fine players, they lose or gain ever so large sums without wincing. As the spectators uttered a cry of admiration for him who was more or less their lion, Gladsden resolved to prove that he could gamble as well as the best of them.
"Señor Don Aníbal, you'll excuse the rest," he said, impudently, like a man who pretty well knew that he had not a friend in the crowd, as he presented his adversary, in all senses of the word, with the cards; "do you mind shuffling them yourself?"
"What for, Señor?" holding his hands away.
"Oh, it is not merely because I believe you _good at shuffling_, but because things are getting serious, and it is important after all that has taken place between us that you should be convinced that I play fair, and that nothing but my better fortune thwarts you."