The Saint to The Rescue by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781258195564
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

". . . and the one with a cross on one side only, and the double-blank. Now, as this chap says first, anyone can see there are three crosses and three blanks, altogether, so if you just shut your eyes and guessed what side was down— or up, for that matter—you'd have an even chance."

"Yeah, if you're guessing—"

"But suppose you're looking. Suppose the chip on the table shows a cross. Then you know it can only be one of these first two, don't you? In other words, the under side is either a cross—or a blank. An even chance. . . . On the other hand, if the side that's up is blank, you know the chip must be one of these second two. So the bottom either has a cross

--or it doesn't. Again, it's fifty-fifty. Or it seems to be."

"What d'ya mean, it seems?"

"Well, that's what was bothering me. Because when I was doing the guessing, I was right about half the time. But this other chap guessed right much more often than not. I lost quite a packet playing with him. So I've started wondering if I was unlucky, or whether there's some trick to it that I haven't seen. I'm sure that the crosses were all exactly alike, and there was nothing on the chips that you could find by feeling them—I thought of that. And the way we played, he couldn't have done any sleight of hand. But if it's legitimate, why go through such a complicated business to set up an even chance?"

Mr. Way fiddled with the chips and frowned over the diagram for a full minute, which is quite a long pause in a conversation. And if his had been an electronic brain instead of the oldfashioned variety, one would have sworn that one could feel the churning incandescence of his tubes.

It had been manifest from the start, to his practically single-minded instincts, that some deceit was involved. But the same ingenuous presentation which had caught his interest had also effectively nipped off any branch lines of thought which might have led towards mechanical props or common legerdemain. He knew that he was confronting some subtle trick of skillful misdirection from the same family as those which had long provided him with a fairly painless livelihood, but a trick which he had somehow failed to master before. It had given him a twinge of professional jealousy to discover that some cheesy plagiarist must be exploiting a colorable imitation of his own method in positively overlapping territory; but this pang had been rapidly alleviated by more constructive thoughts of the profits he might derive from swiping this Dong Hai routine for his own repertoire. All he needed was to twig the trick, and' he even had a self-confessed pushover already set up and waiting for the shove.

It may be cited as some kind of testimonial to his misguided genius that he found the solution in those sixty seconds of seething cogitation—a par for the problem

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