a place for men.  You," and he leveled his forefinger at the slim figure, "go!"

She ignored him.  Stepping forward quickly, she whipped off her left glove and in the bare white fingers, blazing with red and green stones set in golden circlets, she caught up the dice cup.  Even now little was seen of her face for the other hand had drawn lower the wide hat, higher the scarf about the throat.

"One die, one throw for it all, Señor Kendric?" she asked.

"I tell you, No!" shouted Ortega.  "And No again!"

Then, when she stood unmoved, her air of insolence like Ruiz Rios's, but even more marked, Ortega burst forward between the men standing in his way, shoving them to right and left with the powerful sweep of his thick arms.  His uplifted hand came down on her shoulder, thrusting her backward.  Her ungloved hand, the left as Kendric marked while he watched interestedly, flashed to her bosom, and leaped out again, a thin-bladed knife in the grip of the bejewelled fingers.  Ortega saw and feared and, grown nimble, sprang back from her.  Quickly enough to save the life in him, not so quickly as entirely to avoid the sweep of the knife.  His sleeve fell apart, slit from shoulder to wrist, and in the opening the man's flesh showed with a thin red line marking it.

There was tumult and confusion for a little while, hardly more than a moment it seemed to Kendric.  He only knew that at the end of it Ortega had gone grumbling away, led by a couple of friends who no doubt would bandage his wounded arm, and that the woman, having put her knife away, appeared not in the least disturbed.  He knew then that while men talked and shouted about him he had not once withdrawn his eyes from her.

"One throw?" she was asking again, the voice as tender, as vaguely disquieting to his senses, as full of low music as before.  He shook himself as though rousing from a trance.

"I do not play at dice with ladies, Señora," he said bluntly.

"Did you bluff, after all?" she asked curiously.  She seemed sincere in her question; he fancied a note of disappointment in her tone.  It was as though she had said before, "Here is a man who is not afraid of big stakes," and as though now she were revising her estimate of him.  "Men will call you Big Mouth," she added.  "And I, I will laugh in your face."

"Where is the money you would wager against mine?" demanded Jim, 

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