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doom in the person of a fat man in a tweed suit of a particularly obnoxious pattern. He raked in a pot of at least two hundred dollars—two thousand if you counted the ring and the sprinkle of tiny cut diamonds that glittered on the green felt table covering.
    “Ante up,” the dealer said. Cash and gold clinked into the pot, the fat man smiled with anticipation, and the dealer looked at her.
    “My rifle,” she said.
    A flick of his gaze took in the lightning rifle from stock to sights. Then he shrugged and dealt her in.
    “And the ring. It goes back in the pot.”
    “You think you can win it back, little lady?” the fat man said, still smiling. He slipped her grandmother’s emerald onto his thumb as if to test the size.
    “I know I can.”
    “I don’t know … I kinda like it.” His fist closed around the emerald and Claire’s temper ignited.
    “Are you afraid of my skill?” she asked, her tone so cool and silky it might almost have been rude.
    His eyes widened. “What skill? You lost the hand.”
    “Ah, but I have the measure of my opponents now. If you do not throw the ring back in, I shall know your true measure, too.”
    His companions snickered, and his cheeks reddened. “You calling me a yellowbelly, missy? You know what happens to people who backtalk Sherwood Leduc?”
    “I know what happens to people who walk away from a display of cowardice.” She smiled sweetly, as if he were a drawing-room dowager who must be placated and plied with cakes. “I’m sure they return to their ships and talk about it, don’t they? Tsk. It’s so difficult to stop people talking, particularly on an airfield the size of this one.”
    He flung the ring so hard it bounced off the table. A cowboy in a brand-new hat caught it one-handed and tossed it back in the pot. “Deal,” snarled Sherwood Leduc.
    With a sunny smile, Claire accepted her cards and fell to her task. She did not see Andrew and Alice talking with the airmen, or hear Alice’s offhand questions. She did not see the cowboy in the new hat swipe her drink and down it himself. Instead, the shape of the table formed in her mind’s eye, and mathematical probabilities, and patterns, all shifting and changing as the minutes crept by.
    And when the cowboy and two others folded, only she, Leduc, and one of his cronies laid their cards on the table.
    Royal flush.
    She had won!
    “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said with real gratitude, raking the pile of gold, the half-dozen diamonds, and the bills toward herself. The ring went back on her finger in the twinkling of an eye, and the rest went into the square leather pouch chained to "+0 chaineher leather corselet. The rifle had not left its holster—nor would it now, to her great relief.
    “Another game,” Sherwood Leduc demanded. “I’ll have that rifle and the ring both.”
    “I think not,” Claire told him. “I have other business that calls me away. I’m out.”
    “ Who’s the yellowbelly now? You haven’t heard the last of me, missy,” he called as she pushed in the stool with one foot and turned away.
    “ Neither has the rest of the company here, I’m sure,” she said sweetly, and headed for a door with a silhouette of a dancer burned into it.
    Once locked in the ladies’ retiring room, which consisted of a hole in the floor with a noxious smell emanating from it, and a broken mirror on the wall, she opened the leather pouch. She redistributed her winnings about her person, since only a fool would walk about the field now with a full purse and Sherwood Leduc’s threats ringing in her ears. Her skirt had two hidden pockets in the bustle that fastened closed with snaps, so in those she secreted the gold and small stones. The paper she stuffed down the inside of her blouse, to be held in place by the corselet. Last, she removed the ever-present ivory pick in her chignon, threaded the ring on it, and worked the jewel deep into her hair. Even if Leduc made good on his threats and cut the purse