Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon by Henri Charrière

north,” he added, with a knowing smile.
    “Thanks. It’s good to know.”
    Toward seven o’clock, Jojo lit the carbide lamp. The two blankets were laid out on the ground. No chairs. The gamblers would either stand or squat. We decided I shouldn’t play that night. Just watch, that’s all.
    They started to arrive. Extraordinary mugs. There were few short men: most were huge, bearded, moustachio’d types. Their hands and faces were clean, and they didn’t smell, but their clothes were all stained and very nearly worn out. Every single one of the shirts, though, was spotlessly clean.
    In the middle of the cloth, eight pairs of dice were neatly arranged, each in a little box. Jojo asked me to give each player a paper cup. There were about twenty of them. I poured out the rum. Not a single guy there jerked up the neck of the bottle to say enough. After just one round, three bottles vanished.
    Each man deliberately took a sip, then put his cup down in front of him and laid an aspirin tube beside it. I knew there were diamonds in those tubes. A shaky old Chinese set up a little jeweler’s scales in front of him. Nobody said much. These men were exhausted: they’d been laboring under the blazing sun, some of them standing in water up to their middies from six in the morning till the sun went down.
    Ha, things were beginning to move! First one, then two, then three players took up a pair of dice and examined them carefully, pressing them tight together and passing them on to their neighbor. Everything must have seemed in order, because the dice were tossed back onto the blanket without anything said. Each time, Jojo picked up the pair and put them hack in their box, all except for the last, which stayed there on the blanket.
    Some men who had taken off their shirts complained of the mosquitoes. Jojo asked me to burn a few handfuls of damp grass, so the smoke would help to drive them out.
    “Who kicks off?” asked a huge copper-colored guy with a thick black curly beard and a lopsided flower tattooed on his right arm.
    “You, if you like,” Jojo said.
    Out of his silver-mounted belt, the gorilla--for he looked very like a gorilla--brought an enormous wad of boilvar notes held in a rubber band.
    “What are you kicking off with, Chino?” asked another man.
    “Five hundred bolos.” Bolos is short for “bolivars.”
    “Okay for five hundred.”
    And the craps rolled. The eight came up. Jojo tried to shoot the eight.
    “A thousand bolos you don’t shoot the eight with double fours,” said another player.
    “I take that,” Jojo said.
    Chino managed to roll the eight, by five and three. Jojo had lost. For five hours on end the game continued without an exclamation, without the least dispute. These men were uncommon gamblers. That night Jojo lost seven thousand bolos and a guy with a game leg more than ten thousand.
    It had been decided to stop the game at midnight, but everyone agreed to carry on for another hour. At one o’clock Jojo said this was the last crack.
    “It was me that kicked off,” said Chino, taking the dice. “I’ll close it. I lay all my winnings, nine thousand boilvars.”
    He had a mass of notes and diamonds in front of him. He covered a whole lot of other stakes and rolled the seven first go.
    At this terrific stroke of luck, a murmur went around for the first time. The men stood up. “Let’s get some sleep.”
    “Well, you saw that, man?” Jojo said when we were alone.
    “Yes, and what I noticed most were those tough mugs. They all carry a gun and a knife. There were even some who sat on their machetes, so sharp they could take your head off in one swipe.”
    “That’s a fact, but you’ve seen others like them.”
    “Still and all... I ran the table on the islands, but I tell you I never had such a feeling of danger as tonight.”
    “It’s all a matter of habit, mac. Tomorrow you’ll play and we’ll win; it’s in the bag. As you see it,” he added, “which are the guys to