The Texan leaned back in the padded swivel chair and yawned.

“God a’mighty, suh! You gonna make up your mind and call me or fold?”

Both hands lay face up on the table. The Texan, with a pair of aces and a pair of queens showing, could go full house easily. The house man had three sixes and a seven showing; it wasn’t much of a start on a straight, but there was a chance one of his three hole cards might be the fourth six.

The woman behind the oil man, pretty but not beautiful, patted her face with a lace handkerchief. She watched impassively as the oil man consulted his three hole cards.

She touched the handkerchief to her upper lip.

The timing was too perfect for Bolan’s suspicious mind. She could be totally innocent. Or she could be with the house, and the handkerchief could be concealing a small radio transmitter. She had seen the Texan’s hidden cards. Did she somehow reveal them?

The house player wore a hearing aid. He shook his head, reached to his stack of chips, called and raised another twenty thousand.

“Bluffing me, you cotton-pickin’ roadrunner!” the Texan growled. He shoveled the blue chips out. “Call you — let’s see them.”

The house man tapped his three sixes. “I’ve got you beaten on the board unless you can top three of a kind.”

The Texan shrugged. “So what the hell — it was a good try. I didn’t have my goddamned full house, not even three queens or aces. But how did you know that?”

Spur felt the tension rise. The Texan could afford to lose the seventy-five thousand he had dropped in that hand. But with more than a hundred fifty thousand on the table, the hardmen were going to be doubly watchful.