The Missing Angel by Erle Cox (lightest ebook reader TXT) 📕

Meanwhile, in his office, Tydvil Jones had fanned his own plans. A touch

on his bell called Miss Brand to the presence. “If Mr. Brewer is about

the office, will you kindly let him know I require to see him,” was the

message he delivered to his secretary.

Geraldine looked at him uncertainly. He read her unspoken uneasiness.

“It is another matter, Miss Brand. I will respect your wishes about this

morning’s affair.”

Reassured, Geraldine returned to her desk and sought Billy on the

warehouse extension lines. She delivered her message with a wicked

little smile, hanging up immediately to prevent the enquiry he would be

sure to make.

A few minutes later, the culprit answered the summons. She heard his

approach, but kept her eyes resolutely on her work. She knew he paused

for a moment beside her, and anathematised her heart for its rebellious

response to his nearness. She heard him enter the room behind her, and

her work suffered because she could not keep her thoughts from what was

going on behind the closed door.

All the morning Billy had been awaiting the summons. He anticipated, and

regretted, the prospect of a summary dismissal. His only regret for his

conduct lay in the thought that his folly had made the task of winning

Geraldine trebly difficult. Being sacked was a comparatively small price

to pay for the glory of holding her in his arms. He had paused for a

second to gratify his eyes with a glimpse of that golden helmet—or was

it copper? Then he marched grimly to what he believed was his official

scaffold.

Tydvil Jones waved him to a chair with a smileless face. The face was a

sign of ill-omen that was balanced by his offer of the chair. Execution,

he thought, would be carried out standing. Billy felt he cut a very poor

spectacle. Since the morning the rich colouring of his left eye had had

time to develop. Its swollen lid drooped until it almost shut out the

light. No man could feel dignified with such an eye, especially in the

presence of one who had seen how he attained to it.

He began to speak, but Tydvil, recognising his intention, cut him short.

“Do not wish to refer to that matter, Brewer, if you please! Miss Brand

has, very magnanimously, I think, interceded on your behalf.” Billy’s

heart gave a jump.

Then, with a very meaning look at the polychrome eye, he went on. “We

will regard the incident as also closed.”

“That’s a nasty one,” thought Billy. But the fact that Geraldine had

interceded took the sting from Tyddie’s irony. If she had turned aside

the wrath of justice she might…

Here Tydvil cut into his golden hopes. “I understand, Brewer, that you

are addicted to gambling in fact that you are in the habit of playing a

card game known as draw poker.”

Billy gasped from the jolt. “Who,” he wondered, “was the kind friend who

had handed that item of news to Tyddie?” Truly, it was his day of

atonement. It seemed as though the bill for the total of his

peccadilloes was being presented at once. “Let ‘em all come,” he

murmured to himself hopelessly.

He admitted the charge, and added, “At the same time, I have never

regarded it as a heinous offence.”

His judge pursed his lips. “Perhaps not, Brewer—that is, compared with

some others I know of, but on which I will not dwell.” The voice was as

dry as a summer’s throat. “However, I did not send for you to censure

you, however much I disapprove of certain of your actions. I wished to

know if you would be good enough to teach, me that game?”

Billy thought his ears had been bewitched. Tyddie asking to be taught

how to play “draw!”

“He’ll be taking me out for a snifter yet,” reflected the senior city

representative of C. B. &.D. His expression revealed his amazement

to Tydvil more completely than words could.

“I can understand your astonishment,” said Mr. Jones, “but the fact (Oh!

Tydvil!) is, I am making a study of the gambling evil. I find I am

handicapped in my investigations by a need of a practical knowledge of

the subject. I am, therefore, looking to you for enlightenment.”

Billy breathed deeply. Two reprieves in ten minutes were rather too much

for him, but he pulled himself together. Billy never questioned for a

moment that Tydvil’s statement was anything but the truth. It proved

again that a reputation for a blameless life is a perfect cloak for a

lapse therefrom. Billy hastened to assert his willingness to oblige, but

suggested the necessity for a pack of cards.

Tydvil nodded. “That has not escaped me,” he replied. Opening a drawer

in his table, he handed his recent purchase across to Billy. “I presume

those will do.”

Billy snapped the twine and, opening the box, slid the cards on to the

table and ran his fingers through them with an expert’s touch. “Of

course, you understand that we must play for some form of stakes?” he

queried.

“I presumed that it would be so,” Tydvil acquiesced sourly, “but I

suggest we play for something of no value—pins, for instance.”

Billy smiled. “They will do for a start, anyhow,” he replied cheerfully.

“My interest is, of course, purely academic,” insisted Mr. Jones.

“Quite so,” admitted Billy as with deft fingers he shuffled cards so

easily as to draw an admiring comment on his dexterity. “Merely a matter

of practice,” Billy said as he dealt each five cards, cleanly and

swiftly.

Then, facing them up, he gave Tydvil his first lesson in the gentle and

unhallowed art of “draw.” It is a game in which the elements are easily

grasped. In spite of its simplicity, however, there is no game demands a

more skilled technique. Nature had richly endowed Billy Brewer with that

brazen sang froid which is a poker player’s best asset.

Billy dealt half a dozen hands face up, and explained the mysteries of

pairs, threes, straights, flushes and fulls, and the chances of

improving on the draw. Then, after dividing the contents of Tydvil’s pin

tray between them, he began a practical demonstration. Tydvil quickly

grasped the essentials, and, before they realised it, the two were deep

in the simple pastime. Single handed “draw” for pins did not appeal to

Billy very strongly, but to Tydvil, it opened up a new and fascinating

avenue of amusement.

In less than half an hour, beginners’ luck and the absence of risk

enabled Tydvil to completely relieve Billy of his stock of pins.

Noting the smile of satisfaction on Jones’s face, Billy suggested that,

had the pins represented cash, his opponent would not have been quite so

venturesome.

The imputation touched Tydvil’s pride in his new found knowledge. It

pricked him into replying. “Well, I would be prepared, for once, to

prove my competence to play for money—a