Chapter 34

“I’ll see that raise, Carpenter, and it’ll cost you just twenty iron men to call....” Plainly, that name, “Rook,” had been taboo; the speaker had been silently reminded of it. The man in the black Stetson—he had been known as Black Steve Annister in the back blocks at Wooloomooloof before he had made of that name a by-word in the honkatonks and the gambling-hells from San Francisco northward to the Wind River country, and beyond it—Black Steve Annister was sitting upright now, but he had retired behind a wide-sprea…