'By a strange concurrence of events, it so happened that by
random throws the Frenchman sometimes knocked all the pins down
at a single swoop, though he clearly could not play--Mr Chase was
sure of that--while the skilful player made every now and then
one of the blunders to which the best players are liable. That
the tradesman lost forty sovereigns will be easily understood;
and did his tale end here it would have differed so little from a
hundred others as scarcely to deserve telling; but it will
surprise many, as it did me, to learn that he then walked to and
from his own house--a distance of precisely a mile each
way--fetched a bill for thirty pounds, which a customer had
recently paid him, got it discounted, went back to the skittle-
ground, and, under the same malignant star, lost the whole.
'It was the only case in my experience of the work going on
smoothly after such a break. I never could account for it, nor
could Mr Chase. Great was the latter's disgust, on setting the
police to work, to find that the French nobleman, his servant,
and the quiet stranger, were all dwellers within half a mile or
so of his own house, and slightly known to him--men who had
trusted, and very successfully, to great audacity and well-
arranged disguise.
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