Chance made his way to the cloakroom, moving without feeling the floor, seeming to move through a dark corridor. The lamps seemed dim, the conversation of groups he passed as meaningless as the click of the cues and spheres of the room behind him.

He wondered idly if he should have spent the last years differently, and decided he should not have.

He was more now than he had been and he felt that it might have been somehow worth it, and wondered whether they used the black hood still in Charleston, and if the knot were tied so as to break the neck when one pitched to the end of the rope. Faster. More merciful. Or if it would be suffocation, twisting at the end of the rope, bound, his tongue inside the hood thrusting out of the mouth, the eyes moving from their sockets.

He hoped the knot would be thick and tied below the right ear.

He wondered if he could ask the hangman for that favor.

His coat and bag were placed on the counter before him, and pushed towards him.

He took his coat and drew it on, and lifted the bag, heavier than a general practitioner’s bag, from the weight of the pistol.

He placed a silver quarter in the shallow wooden bowl. He noticed the arrows in the claws of the eagle, and then the coin was gone.

“Good-night, Sir,” he heard.

“Yes,” said Chance. “Good-night.”

Edward Chance, physician, returned to the gaming salon, where he was joined by a large, red-mustached man who accompanied him down the three flights of stairs until they emerged together on brick-paved Madison Avenue.

“Cigar?” asked Grawson.

“No,” said Chance.

A cab clattered past, like a high black box on four wheels, the cabby sitting behind with a long whip, touching the flanks of his team.