"Roulette" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But the words rolled no farther than the tongue's edge. She turned obediently back, re-entering the car and taking the first seat by the door. For this her memory was responsible. It had spun the day's events before her like a roulette wheel, stopping precisely at the remark of Marjorie Schuyler's concerning William Burgeman: "He's the most conventional young gentleman I ever saw in my life. Why, you ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... of the Champs-Elysees sellers, who showed me as hunters a fine collection of broken—down skeletons. Average price, three thousand francs. Roulette had treated me badly of late, and I was neither in the humor, nor had I the funds, to spend in that way seven or eight hundred louis ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... rewarded his master recently by cutting his throat at night. As superstitious as he is fanatic and uncivilized, the Moro is a failure as a member of the human race. Even the children are the incarnation of the fiend. There was that boy at Iligan who worked at the officer's club, and who hung over the roulette-wheel like a perfect devil, crowing with demoniac glee when he was lucky. These are our latest citizens—this batch of serpents' eggs hatched out in human form; and those who have seen the Moro in his native home will tell ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Cassidy's. By some odd fortuity, a phonograph broke into wheezy song as the wayfarers swung down the street. Dice began to roll invitingly across the bars, and from a distant spot came the hollow sound of the roulette-ball. Quite by chance, a man appeared in a doorway, holding a glass of beer. He was seen to drain it, just as they passed. Then he noticed them ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... clicking her castanets and casting languishing glances at the ring of auditors about her. These performers were invariably showered with coins. Tables of all sizes filled the center of the room from the long roulette board to the little round ones where drinks were served. Faro, monte, roulette, rouge et noir, vingt-un, chuck-a-luck and poker: each found its disciples; now and then a man went quietly out and another took his place; there was nothing to indicate that he had lost perhaps thousands of dollars, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... "buck the tiger," and soon lost nearly all of it. To see if his luck would not change, he gave up the game, and started at "roulette." Here he steadily won, and soon had over seven hundred dollars in his possession. He was now all excitement, and jumped with many a "whoop-la" around the table, to the great amusement of the spectators. He was about to give up play, ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... recent railway and mining activity in the neighborhood had brought a considerable influx of people to King Phillip Sound, and the strains of music from dance-hall doors, the click of checks and roulette balls from the saloons, gave ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines; the gamblers sit round the table with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... much as mention them. For the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance. I recognised ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... know?" she exclaimed wearily. "I haven't seen him since morning, and don't expect to see him before breakfast to-morrow. He's at his club or drinking and carousing, or in some gambling house playing roulette. How ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... distinguish themselves; as were the multitude of other archers assembled. They were from all neighboring countries—crowds of English, as you may fancy, armed with Murray's guide-books, troops of chattering Frenchmen, Frankfort Jews with roulette-tables, and Tyrolese, with gloves and trinkets—all hied towards the field where the butts were set up, and the archery practice was to be held. The Childe and his brother archers were, it need not be said, early ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this time, shooed them into the plush and crayon-enlargement parlor behind the barroom. His great voice overawed them—and they were cold. Mother secretively looked for evidences of vice, for a roulette-table or a blackjack, but found nothing more sinful than a box of dominoes, so she perched on a cane chair and folded her ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... Suvorin, who did not stint himself, drew him into spending more than he intended, and he owed Suvorin a sum which was further increased at Monte Carlo by Chekhov's losing nine hundred roubles at roulette. But this loss was a blessing to him in so far as, for some reason, it made him feel satisfied with himself. At the end of April, 1891, after a stay in Paris, Chekhov returned to Moscow. Except at Vienna and for the first days in Venice and at Nice, it had ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Hyde Park. As soon as I had made this discovery I felt an intense compassion for all persons of the Teutonic race to whom sea-bathing once a year happens to be indispensable. However, if dull, it must at least be economical, I thought; but this illusion was dispelled when I found that there was a roulette-table in the dingy little Conversations-Haus, and when my landlord handed me in a bill which would not have disgraced any hotel in Bond Street or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... gets mixed up in some banking scandals,—he would, like a fool, play roulette—baccarat was always his strong game,—disappears from Vienna, is arrested at the frontier, escapes, and is found the next morning under a brush-heap with a bullet through his head. This ends the search. Two years ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... know what this place is, old man? Monaco is a principality, about six miles square, ruled by a prince, and the whole business of the country, for it is a "country" the same as though it had a king, is gambling. They have all the different kinds of gambling, from chuck-a-luck at two bits to roulette at a million dollars a minute. What started dad to come to Monte Carlo is more than I know, unless it was a new American he has got acquainted with, a fellow from North Dakota, that dad met at a sort of dance that he did not take me to. It seems there is a place in Paris where ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... superabundant, and depreciated currency results in a wild orgy of stock gambling, grain gambling, cotton gambling, and all the rest of it. There is no more of good in that—in fact, there is far more of harm in it to the country—than there would be if everybody went to betting at roulette or faro. It makes the lucky gamblers rich and the unlucky ones poor, but it produces nothing, even incidentally. This time the gambling is taking a more productive form. Instead of betting on market fluctuations, ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... sauce-pan as will hold it. Into the fat remaining in the pan put two finely-chopped onions, and cook until a pale yellow; then add two table-spoonfuls of flour, and stir three minutes longer. Pour upon this one pint and a half of boiling water. Boil up once, and pour over the roulette; then add two cloves, one-fourth of a teaspoonful of pepper and one heaping teaspoonful of salt. Cover the sauce-pan, and set where it will simmer slowly for three hours. After the first hour and a half, turn the roulette over. Serve hot; with the gravy strained over it. It is also nice to serve ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... passed along Rue Conti, or Saint Louis, or the Rue Bourbon, you could not fail to notice several large gilded lamps, upon which you might read "faro" and "craps", "loto" or "roulette,"—odd words to the eyes of the uninitiated, but well enough understood by those whose business it was to traverse the streets of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... after day, unmoved by events that might have disturbed other men and unstirred by emotions that might have turned other men from their paths, he looked out over the city and "played his game" with all the cold impassiveness of a gambler operating an infallible system in roulette. No detail was too small to escape his notice, no agent too ignoble ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... concluded that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew. But who in the world was it he resembled? The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle at roulette. Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to me. He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... Genoese, the gambling instinct? For he is an authority on stocks and shares, and a passionate card-player into the bargain. Gambling and religion go hand-in-hand —they are but two forms of the same speculative spirit. Think of the Poles, an entire nation of pious roulette-lovers! I have yet to meet a full-blown agnostic who relished these hazards. The unbeliever is not adventurous on such lines; he knows the odds against backing a winner in ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated chateau, whose owner is playing dominoes at the cafe of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire to express the opposite of natural tastes, we habitually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... enough to the fighting to realize the blood and tears of this war. But the Prince thought of nothing, but his own amusement. To live as he did, within sound of the guns, with parties every night, women and dancing and roulette and champagne suppers—bah! c'etait trop fort! It awakened in me the love of country which lies dormant in all of us. I wanted to help my country, lest I might sink as ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... wath a fool. Got himself mixthed up with the crookth. Thet up a roulette table in the thellar and let 'em come and gamble away their thwag. Thtoopid thing to do, though, mind you, he did a rare good line while it lathted. Got the sthuff for nothing, you thee.' His tone at this point was ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... by grooms. Comes a broken-winded tootle on a coach-horn and the black-and- scarlet drag of the local garrison trundles into view. The unsophisticated gun-horses in the lead shy violently at the flapping canvas of an orange-stall and swerve to the left into a roulette-booth presided over by a vociferous ancient in a tattered overcoat and blue spectacles. The gamblers scatter like flushed partridges and the ancient bites the turf beneath his upturned board amid a shower ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... dimly lighted anteroom and this, in turn, through a large arch, opened on a large room brilliantly lighted by chandeliers—one in the centre and one near each corner. Around three sides of this room were placed the keno layouts, roulette-wheels, faro-tables, and minor gambling devices. Off the ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... to be ironed out was how to speed up transportation; and failing that, to construct spacious space ships which would attract pleasure-bent trade from Terra—Earth to you—with such innovations as roulette wheels, steam rooms, cocktail lounges, double rooms with hot and cold babes, and ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... to stay; hasn't he, Dolly?—Oh, I forgot—Miss Wilming, Mr. Hamil, who's doing the new park, you know. All kinds of genius buzzes in his head—roulette wheels buzz in mine. Hamil, you remember Miss Wilming in the 'Motor Girl.' She was one of the acetylenes. Come on; we'll all light up later. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... along the river front where St. Mary's Market now stands, and one could walk a mile, it is said, over the tops of these boats without going ashore. No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen's rendezvous, called the "Swamp," a wild, rough quarter, where roulette, whiskey, ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... spacious square soon became as thronged as the Rue de Quincampoix : from morning to night it presented the appearance of a fair. Booths and tents were erected for the transaction of business and the sale of refreshments, and gamblers with their roulette tables stationed themselves in the very middle of the place, and reaped a golden, or rather a paper, harvest from the throng. The Boulevards and public gardens were forsaken; parties of pleasure took their walks in preference in the Place Vendome, which became the fashionable lounge ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... below-stairs was in darkness. He took off his shoes and went into a room on the first floor. Striking a match, he saw only ordinary furniture. The room back of it revealed to his failing match a roulette table. He went out into the hall and up the stairs with the utmost caution to avoid noise. On the second floor the door of the front room was ajar. They must be careless and confident, he reflected as he entered. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... of his money in the days when gambling was "open" in the town, and he had surrounded himself with a band of choice spirits who were experts in keno, roulette and poker. These still remained on his hands, some of them in the capacity of barkeepers, and others practically as pensioners. They were all great sportsmen, heavy drinkers and loyal-to-the-death friends. At short intervals they went on hunting trips down the river, ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... to recoup face for Russian sportsmanship, many of these refugees grimly began playing almost non-stop games of "Russian roulette," which gives the player a five-to-one chance of living. Some extreme chauvinists proudly reduced the odds to three-to-one by inserting two bullets, and a former Red Army major named Tolbunin even used three. His tour de force was widely ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... contrary, the Cambridge lads and their pale-faced tutor avoided with maiden coyness; there were old Pall Mall loungers bound for Ems and Wiesbaden and a course of waters to clear off the dinners of the season, and a little roulette and trente-et-quarante to keep the excitement going; there was old Methuselah, who had married his young wife, with Captain Papillon of the Guards holding her parasol and guide-books; there was young May who was carrying off his bride on a pleasure ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cutting up the carcases of goats hanging from hooks... In one corner, in a tent repaired in a thousand different colours, was a Moorish official with a big book and spectacles. Over there is a crowd. There are cries of rage. It is a roulette game that has been set up on a corn bin and the tribesmen gathered about it have started fighting with knives. Elsewhere, there are cheers, laughter and stamping of feet, a merchant and his mule have fallen into the river and are in danger of drowning.... There are ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... "Adelphi" towers, with its grand gambling saloon, its splendid "salle a manger," and cosey nooks presided over by attractive Frenchwomen. Long tables, under crystal chandeliers, offer a choice of roads to ruin. Monte, faro, rouge et noir, roulette, rondo and every gambling device are here, to lure the unwary. Dark-eyed subtle attendants lurk, ready to "preserve order," in gambling parlance. At night, blazing with lights, the superb erotic pictures on the walls look down on a mad crowd of desperate gamesters. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... have happened if it had not been for cards and roulette and the perpetual desire of increasing their capital— for the worthy couple fell into the hands of a talented company, whose agents robbed them at Frascati's in Paris, and again in Hamburg and various health resorts, so that hardly a year had passed when Bodlevski one fine night woke up to the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... coming; for his gratuities were as large when he lost as when he won Even the reserved proprietor, accustomed as he was to a wealthy and careless clientele, treated Percival with marked consideration after a night when the young man persuaded him to withdraw the limit at roulette, and spent a large sum in testing a system for breaking the wheel, given to him by a friend ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... farce at Hooley's, then to sup at the Richelieu, and finally to visit a certain exclusive gambling-parlor which then flourished on the South Side—the resort of actors, society gamblers, and the like—where roulette, trente-et-quarante, baccarat, and the honest game of poker, to say nothing of various other games of chance, could be played ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... cards and horses and roulette it isn't so nice, I know, mamma; but it don't need to mean he's a born gambler, does it? Boys have got ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... could recall from any other scene, as the natural train or circle, as he might say, of such a presence. For an instant he thought he had got the face as a specimen of imperturbability watched, with wonder, across the hushed rattle of roulette at Monte-Carlo; but this quickly became as improbable as any question of a vulgar table d'hote, or a steam-boat deck, or a herd of fellow-pilgrims cicerone-led, or even an opera-box serving, during a performance, for frame of a type observed from the stalls. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... eyes as she smiled and said more quietly, "Then you are in even worse trouble than I thought. I hear a lot about what happens to these strange people who never lose at cards or at dice or at roulette. Aren't you afraid of winding up in the gutter with your throat slit? Isn't that what happens to people with psi powers who gamble?" she insisted. "What's your trick, Tex? Do you stack the deck with telekinesis, or does precognition tell you ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... its many recesses and deep windows, an apartment which took up the whole of one side of the large house, had all the dignity and even splendour of a drawing-room, and yet, with its little palm court, its cosy divans, its bridge tables and roulette board, encouraged an air of freedom which made ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... anxious here when they play; it is not at all a joke as the roulette used to be at Nazeby; and they do put a lot on, although counters don't seem to be much to look at. It is not at all a difficult game, Mamma, and some of the people were so lucky turning up "naturels," ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... there, or anyone else. As they say of marriage, it's a lottery. They might have roulette, or a spiritual seance, or ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... in the evening when Glenister entered the Northern and passed idly down the row of games, pausing at the crap-table, where he rolled the dice when his turn came. Moving to the roulette-wheel, he lost a stack of whites, but at the faro "lay- out" his luck was better, and he won a gold coin on the "high- card." Whereupon he promptly ordered a round of drinks for the men grouped about him, a formality always precedent ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... other gambling-tables for Rouge et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games of hazard. The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the loss. Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from night till morning, without interruption, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... municipal council of this beautiful city, like Esau, had just sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They had conceded the right of gambling to the Casino, the proprietors purchasing the right by certain outlays in the way of improvements, a new public garden, and so on. As yet roulette and rouge-et-noir are not permitted at Nice, the gambling at present carried on being apparently harmless. It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... all back,' she said optimistically; 'but not here. These silly little horses are no good. I shall go somewhere where one can play comfortably at roulette. You needn't look so shocked. I've always felt that, given the opportunity, I should be an inveterate gambler, and now you darlings have put the opportunity in my way. I must drink your very good healths. Waiter, a bottle of PONTET CANET. Ah, it's number seven on the wine list; I shall plunge ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... crystal glasses of all shapes and sizes, arranged in pyramids and cubes. The whole of the main floor was carpeted heavily. Down the centre were stationed two rows of gambling tables, where various games could be played—faro, keeno, roulette, stud poker, dice. Beyond these gambling tables, on the other side of the room from the bar, were small tables, easy chairs of ample proportions, lounges, and a fireplace. Everything was most ornate. The ceilings and walls were ivory white ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... his demeanor; fond of the pipe and the beer-glass; and as one of his maxims was, "Not to close any door through which Fortune might enter," he not only occasionally bought a lottery-ticket, but was sometimes to be seen, during the season, at the roulette-tables of Baden-Baden. One of his friends declares, however, that he never obtruded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... cycle; truckle, caster, roulette, rowel; gear, cogwheel, miter wheel; pulley, sheave (wheel of a pulley). Associated words: spoke, felly, hub, strake, tire, straddle, cog, sprocket, linchpin, arbor, axle, axletree, sprag, traction, trochilics, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... I did not notice all this at first. What I did notice, however, was a faro-layout and a hazard-board, but as no one was playing at either, my eye quickly traveled to a roulette-table which stretched along the middle of the room. Some ten or a dozen men in evening clothes were gathered watching with intent faces the spinning wheel. There was no money on the table, nothing but piles of chips of various denominations. Another thing that surprised ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... imported from Coldriver for the event, opened Brill's roulette layout in one corner, a game he usually operated himself on the occasions when his patrons chose to try their fortune against the bank. The rattle of chips, the whir of the ivory ball and the professional chant of lookout and croupier sounded ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... care to risk twenty thousand francs to buy a secret that may make rich men of you?' Why, the risk usually is in proportion to the profit, gentlemen. You stake twenty thousand francs on your luck. A gambler puts down a louis at roulette for a chance of winning thirty-six, but he knows that the louis is lost. Do ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sense treated of in this book, has ceased in England. If there be here and there a Roulette or Rouge et Noir table in operation, its existence is now known only to a few 'sworn-brethren;' if gambling at cards 'prevails' in certain quarters, it is 'kept quiet.' The vice is not barefaced. It slinks and skulks away ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... rooms where the games of chance were in operation, many handsomely gowned women and well-dressed men were moving from place to place conversing in quiet tones, but crowds were centered around the roulette tables, where the chairs were all occupied and many people were standing. We joined the throng around one of these and saw that the table was divided into numbered spaces, some colored red and some black. In the centre of the table was a little wheel with spaces ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... the border country. Dark-skinned Mexicans rubbed shoulders with range riders baked almost as brown by the relentless sun. Pima Indians and Chinamen and negroes crowded round the faro and dice tables. Games of monte and chuckaluck had their devotees, as had also roulette and poker. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... desperate. Only a little more than six thousand dollars had been spent on the carnival and no opportunity of annihilating the roulette winnings seemed to offer itself. His experience at Monte Carlo did not encourage him to try again, and Peggy's attitude toward the place was distinctly antagonistic. The Riviera presenting no new opportunities for extravagance, it became ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... loosened by the foot of a descending wayfarer, in whom, as he picked his way slowly downward, I recognized a middle-aged German (that I supposed to be his nationality) who had been very assiduous at the roulette-tables of the Casino for some days past. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance, his spectacled eyes, squat nose, and square-cropped bristling beard being simply characteristic of his class and country. He did ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... by month and season by season carried on her quiet trade at the foot of the Casino steps, catching, as it were, the tiny drippings from the flaring tapers in that Temple of Gold. And day after day, one turn of the roulette wheel took and gave more money than all her years of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... One noticed magnificent gilt roulette tables and sedan-chairs of the very best make. There were elegant stalls at which trinkets were distributed to the guests,—note-books, pocket-mirrors, gloves, knives, scissors, purses, fans, sweetmeats, scents, pastilles, and perfumes of ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... all this, went straight into the gaming-rooms; he was curious to see whether his friend, being fond of experiments, was trying combinations at roulette. But he was not to be found in any of the gilded chambers, among the crowd that pressed in silence about the tables; so that Bernard presently came and began to wander about the lamp-lit terrace, where innumerable groups, seated and strolling, made the ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake on the table was of a special substance and our roulette the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick's absence that ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... life had been spent listening to the rattle of the drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as his last dollar went to the relentless tiger's maw, that the keeper's foot was upon an electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop where his stake was not. He simply said, "Thank God. I thought that prince of cheats, Fate, who all through life ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... passions and the most lasting. In some, happily, the serpent sleeps for ever, the fire is for ever banked. But it needs only the opportunity to rouse the dull ember into flame, to stir the venom of the serpent. It seems a simple thing to toss a coin on the roulette boards. Sometimes the act is done contemptuously, sometimes indifferently, sometimes in the spirit of fun and curiosity; but the result is always ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once, but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was avaricious; few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not live without the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of Throgmorton Street to any air in the world,' he observed. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... demanded whiskey, and he would brook any insult to get it. He had reached the level of the sodden, and others passed him by. It was yet early in the night, and crowds were gathering in the rear of the large room, about the roulette wheel, the crap tables and faro layout, back of which the lookout was seated on a raised platform. Stacks of coin in gold and silver were on the tables to tempt the players. At other tables men were seated playing cards and smoking. In an adjoining room, cut with archways, was the dance ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... engaged in watching had been playing at roulette with five-franc pieces, and the woman was now counting her gains and laughing gaily with her husband as she slowly sipped her tea flavoured with orange-flower water. They were in ignorance of the presence of that lynx-eyed man in grey flannels and straw hat who smoked his ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... this reputation, he was always free of the handsome salons wherein the Friends of Humanity devoted themselves to roulette, auction bridge, baccarat and chemin-de-fer: and of this freedom he now proceeded to avail himself, with his hat just a shade aslant on his head, his hands in his pockets, a suspicion of a smile on his lips and a glint of the devil in his eyes—in all an expression accurately ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the front was open to enfilade. Stuart and his artillery, withdrawn to a more favourable position, secured the left. D.H. Hill on the right, though part of his force had given way, still held the Roulette House and the sunken road, and the troops in the West Wood were well protected from the Northern batteries. The one weak point was the gap occupied by Greene's Federals, which lay between Grigsby's ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... off than the shipwrecked sailor; the pawnbroker had taken his last resources. All the romance with which he had invested the idea of his suicide now vanished, leaving bare the stern and ignoble reality. He must kill himself, not like the gay gamester who voluntarily leaves upon the roulette table the remains of his fortune, but like the Greek, who surprised and hunted, knows that every door will be shut upon him. His death would not be voluntary; he could neither hesitate nor choose the fatal hour; he must kill himself because he had not the means ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... tables; the roulette tables," corrected Meakim. "Of course," he continued, grinning, "if you're fond of the game, Mr. Holcombe, it's handy having them in the same house, but I can steer you against a better one back of the French Consulate. Those at ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... one of these gambling resorts. A long, low room, probably a saloon, with the pretentious bar in front; tables on either side of the room, and an eager group round each one, the game being roulette, faro, highball, poker, crapps or monte. The dealers, or professional gamblers, are easily distinguished. Their dress consists invariably of a well-laundered "biled" (white) shirt, huge diamond stud in front, no collar or tie, perhaps a silk handkerchief tied loosely ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... the downward fluttering of the wearied eagle!" mused Alan Hawke. "Women, roulette, champagne, and high life—all these past riches fade away into the gloomy pleasures of restaurant cognac, dead-shot absinthe, and the vicarious smiles of a broken soubrette or so! And all the more you can be now dangerous to me, Monsieur Casimir Wieniawski, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... learn of the divorce, and—Just at that instant my eyes fell on Mr. Harbison—Tom Harbison, as Anne called him. He was looking on with an amused, half-puzzled smile, while people were rushing around hiding the roulette wheel and things of which Miss Caruthers might disapprove, and Betty Mercer was on her knees winding up a toy bear that Max had brought her. What would he think? It was evident that he thought badly of us already—that he was ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the elite of Tucson in the dance-hall the evenin' I has in mind. The bar is busy; while up an' down each side sech refreshin' pastimes as farobank, monte an' roulette holds prosperous sway. Thar's no quadrille goin' at the moment, an' a lady to the r'ar is ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... exclaimed, "This must be very beautiful when there is water!" They breakfasted at the Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves to a game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand fountain; they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons at the roulette establishment of the Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and were ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... at seventy I'll take flutters at roulette; While at eighty hope I'll make good at poker yet; And in fashionable togs to the races go, Gayest of the gay old dogs, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... many blades of grass as there are boys are taken, and a knot is made on the end of one of them. The biggest boy holds the blades between the fingers and thumb of his closed hand, and whoever draws the blade with the knot has to act as herdsman" (543. 221). Nowadays, children are employed to turn roulette-wheels, sort cards, pick out lottery-tickets, select lucky numbers, set machinery going for the first time, and perform other like actions; for, though men are all "children of fortune," there is something about real children that brings luck and prospers all enterprises ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... with a modest simper. He felt like a gambler who has placed his all on a number at roulette and sees the white ball tumble into ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... was always rather attentive to me, and, to give him the credit due, seemed anxious that I should not play. At supper he always reserved the chair next to himself for me. One night while standing beside the roulette wheel, no one was playing, and the dealer was idly whirling the ball, a sudden impulse seized me, and the ball then rolling, I pulled a $20 bill from my pocket and threw it down on the red remarking, "I'll lose that to pay for my suppers." Unhappily I won, and, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... wide doors of the gambling hall the scene amazed him. There were forty tables running—roulette, blackjack, craps, stud poker—and round them men crowded three to five deep. Down the full length of one side of the room ran a bar nearly a hundred and fifty feet long, and in the rear end of the great barnlike structure thirty or forty girls, most of them American, sang ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... de Pera there was a cafe chantant which was run by one Napoleon Flam. There was a little silver hell attached to it where there was a roulette table with twenty-four numbers and a double zero. There were always plenty of flying strangers who were prepared to throw away their money here, and I fancy that the fat Greek who presided over the table made a fat thing of ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... who told me that this game was particularly pleasing because you did not see from whom you were winning, as is the case in other games; a lackey brought, not money, but chips; each man lost a little stake, and his disappointment was not visible . . . It is the same with roulette, which is everywhere prohibited, ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... all German habits. The wicked German hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar, and Goethe's Marguerites would ruin the Jewess' child and shorten his days; for when Fritz came of age, Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very pretty fortune to his nephew. But while roulette at Baden and elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm Schwab among them) devoured the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz, the prodigal son himself remained by the will of Providence to point a moral to younger brothers in the free ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... mining towns, Carson had an immense saloon, with all the sporting attachments, such as billiards, roulette, faro, poker, etc., and at all times of the day and night it was frequented by hundreds of men, who amused themselves talking, drinking, gambling and reading their letters, as most of them received their correspondence ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... sale of apples and porter and cakes. A train had come in a little before at a station a mile or so away, and a number of the usual trick characters, with their stock-in-trade, were hurrying down to the sea. The roulette man passed us first, unfolding his table and calling out at the ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... lofty and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building, those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as palaces of justice, are oppressively ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... at all! It's the same woman!" whispered the tall, good-looking young Englishman in a well-cut navy suit as he stood with his friend, a man some ten years older than himself, at one of the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, the first on the right on entering the room—that one known to habitual gamblers as "The ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... universally played are "rouge et noir" and "roulette," the former also denominated "trente et quarante," though both titles insufficiently explain the tendency of the game, especially as "noir" never has any part or parcel in the affair, all being ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... with false fronts. The sidewalks were cement instead of boards. The main street was even paved. A sort of New England respectability and quietness hung over it. There was not a single saloon, and the drone of the little marble in the roulette wheel was gone from the land. Even the horses, hitched by drooping heads to racks, were scarce, and their place was taken by numerous tin automobiles of ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... concourse. There were riots and quarrels all the time. They often had to send a troop of cavalry to clear the street at night. Gamblers posted themselves with their implements among the speculators, who gambled harder than the gamblers, and took an occasional turn at roulette by way of slackening the excitement; as people go to sleep, or go into the country. A hunchback fellow made a good deal of money by letting people write on his back. When Law had moved into the Hotel ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... atmosphere of the Rudolstadt Vogelwiese. At this time my troubles again brought me more or less into contact with the vice of gambling, although on this occasion it only cast temporary fetters about me in the very harmless form of the dice and roulette-tables out ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the remainder of the steer, and a couple of others that had been killed, and then knocked off for the day. Jurgis went downtown to supper, with three friends who had been on the other trucks, and they exchanged reminiscences on the way. Afterward they drifted into a roulette parlor, and Jurgis, who was never lucky at gambling, dropped about fifteen dollars. To console himself he had to drink a good deal, and he went back to Packingtown about two o'clock in the morning, very much the worse for his excursion, and, it must be confessed, entirely deserving the calamity ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... luxurious, although it was comfortably fitted and furnished. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke, and a great crowd of men were playing roulette, faro, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... particularly characterised that metropolitan winter: the reckless rage for private gambling through the mediums of bridge and roulette; the incorporation of a company known as The Inter-County Electric Company, capitalised at a figure calculated to disturb nobody, and, so far, without any avowed specific policy other than that which served to decorate a ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... objection, they entered. The first sight of the interior made clear the character of the place. There were numerous tables, spread with games,—faro, monte, and roulette,—each surrounded by an absorbed and interested group. "Easy come, easy go," was the rule with the early California pioneers, and the gaming-table enlisted in its service many men who would not have dreamed at home that they ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Marigny with "Jimmy" Devar caused him to regard this unknown Frenchman with a suspicion that was already active enough so far as Mrs. Devar was concerned. And the Marchioness of Belfort, too! A decrepit old cadger with an infallible system for roulette! ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... learned to drive as a war measure. After the first time I ever tried to turn it around, and it flew at our lovely rose-garlanded lattice fence at one hundred miles an hour, I christened it "the little fury." I missed the fence by revolving the steering wheel as though I were playing roulette. I almost went round twice, but J—— rescued me by kicking my foot off the throttle. Since then I have sufficiently mastered it to drive to town for the laundry and the newspaper. I am like a child learning to walk by having an orange rolled in front of it. I must ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... next twenty-four hours in making all arrangements for their flight together. He raised as much money as he could, even stooping to try his luck at roulette to increase his hoard. The appointed moment of their departure approached. As he waited impatiently in the hotel hall, a letter was brought him. It was a letter from Irina ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... cafe's under vines—and terraces of cannon, and at last a funny, pathetic little casino. It was such a queer imitation of Aix and Monte Carlo— There were chasseurs and footmen in magnificent livery and stucco white walls ornamented with silk SHAWLS. Also a very good band and a new roulette table— Coming in out of the night and the rain it was like a theatre after the "dark scene" has just passed— There were some most dignified croupiers and three English women and a few sad English men ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... too stepped forward to the centre of the room and began to watch the game. I have never seen roulette played elsewhere, so do not know if its accessories greatly vary, but this ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... passion for gambling; indeed there were few gaming-tables in Europe at which the "jolly fast Marchioness" was not a familiar and notorious figure. And his father, the Marquess, was as devoted to horses and turf-gambling as his wife to her cards and roulette. That the child of such parents should inherit their depraved tastes is not to be marvelled at. And it was not long before they manifested themselves in a ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... picturesque. Flickering lights, gay laughter—sometimes curses and the sounds of revolver shots, of battles fought close and quick and to a finish—wheezy music, click of ivory chips, the clink of glasses, from old Bonanza's and similar rendezvous of hilarity lured to the dance, faro, roulette, the poker table ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... the streets, and certainly there are no weeds in the gardens. The profits of the gambling-tables provide the most efficient municipality in the world, and no one who lives in Monaco is charged any taxes; the revenue derived from roulette covers all that and more besides. At the same time, no actual resident is allowed to stake his money at ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... districts. Rheinweinbechers Klang - The Rhine wine goblet's sound. Richter,(Jean Paul Fr.) - A distinguished German author. Ridersmann,(Reitersmann in Ger.) - Rider. Ring - A political clique or cabal. Ringe,(Ger.) - Rings. Ritter,(Ger.) - Knight. Roland - One of the paladins of Charlemagne. Rolette - Roulette. Rollin' locks - Rolling logs, mutually aiding (used only in politics.) Rosen,(Ger.) - Roses. Rouse,(Ger. Heraus) ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... part of the house, closed now, of course, as the races for the day were run. But I could imagine it doing a fine business in the afternoon. There were many other games now in progress, games of every description, from poker to faro, keno, klondike, and roulette. There was nothing of either high or low degree with which the venturesome might ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... chances of their daily life are sufficient stimuli for the beneficial excitement of their nerve centers. It has remained for civilized man, protected in a measure from the natural dangers of existence, to invent artificial stimulants in the form of cards and dice and roulette wheels. Yet when necessity bids there are no greater gamblers than the savage denizens of the jungle, the forest, and the hills, for as lightly as you roll the ivory cubes upon the green cloth they will gamble with death—their own ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... force. [things that go around] carousel, merry-go-round; Ferris wheel; top, dreidel^, teetotum; gyroscope; turntable, lazy suzan; screw, whirligig, rollingstone^, water wheel, windmill; wheel, pulley wheel, roulette wheel, potter's wheel, pinwheel, gear; roller; flywheel; jack; caster; centrifuge, ultracentrifuge, bench centrifuge, refrigerated centrifuge, gas centrifuge, microfuge; drill, augur, oil rig; wagon wheel, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... everything, gambling saloons, dance halls, fights, whatever was going, and as Lola has done it all before, she said she would stay with the girls, and have a little mild flutter in the saloon of the hotel at roulette while our stalwart cavaliers escorted us "around." Gaston, too, remained behind with them; the Senator manoeuvred this, because he said, it was not wise to be with people who were quarrelsome, and Gaston is that now and then ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... Lazy Lou, Lazy Susan's big twin brother, a giant roulette wheel of cheese, every number a winner. A second Lazy Lou will bear the savories and go-withs. For these tidbits the English have a divine genius; think of the deviled shrimps, smoked oysters, herring roe on toast, snips of broiled sausage ... But we will make do ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... chairs. To them its spoken word was the dictum of fate. Success meant debts paid, a balance in the bank, houses, horses, even yachts and estates—failure meant obscurity and suffering. The turn of the roulette wheel or the roll of a cube of ivory they well knew brought the same results, but these turnings they also knew were attended with a certain loss of prestige. Taking a flier in the Street was altogether different—great ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... several nicks in the butts of their revolvers testified mutely as to their prowess. Their place was like all other dens, and consisted of the usual bar and lunch counter in one room, while in the adjoining one was the hall of gaming. Faro, roulette, hazard, monte, and the great national game, poker, held high carnival there nightly. Next to the "Goose" was a long narrow room used as a shooting gallery. The place was only a few doors around the corner from my office, and many ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the regularly appointed official safecrackers representing the Municipal Ownership of Petty and Grand Larceny. The only gambling houses left were under the direct supervision of the Mayor acting ex-officio and the Chairman of the Aldermanic Committee on Faro and Roulette. The Game of Bunco became a duly authorised official diversion under control of the Tax Assessors, and the Town Toper, being elected by popular vote, could get as leery as he pleased by public consent. Life Insurance Agents became likewise Public Servants under ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... Klondike was going. There were two roulette wheels, a faro table, and one circle of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... whose memory is now fondly cherished by every pioneer who knew him. He could win or lose with the same perpetual joviality, but he generally won. The principal gambling game in those days was Mexican monte, played with forty cards. Poker was also played a great deal. Keno, faro and roulette were not introduced until later, and the same may be said ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... with the turbulent life that drifts to every wild frontier on the boom. Faro dealers from the Klondike, poker dealers from Nome, roulette croupiers from Leadville, were all here to reap the rich harvest to be made from investors, field workers, and operators. Smooth grafters with stock in worthless companies for sale circulated in and out with blue-prints and whispered ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... rescued with difficulty from a street mob that unreasonably refused to accept intoxication as an excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later, during the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of his disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette. ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... that matter about blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all that; useful, very,—of course,—great obligations to the Godolphin "Arabian," and the rest. I say racing horses are essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two phases of society,—a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... hall in the place, a heavy gambling game was going on. There was roulette, faro, and monte, ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... roulette," replied Jimmy, pleasantly. "Me and Mrs. Van are going to get spliced just as soon as the Ouija board tells her ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... Indians in the frontier villages of America. Near the churchyard-gate was a booth, filled with flaunting calicos; and opposite sat an old woman behind a table, which was loaded with ginger-bread. She had a roulette at her elbow, where the peasants risked a kreutzer for a cake. On other tables, cases of knives, scythes, reaping-hooks, and other implements of husbandry ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... six tables with layouts for games of chance. Faro, "klondike," roulette, stud-poker, almost anything possibly to be desired was there. All were in full blast. Three deep the men were gathered about the wheel and the "tiger." Gold money in stacks stood at every dealer's hand. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... accommodation of families, and contain two rooms each. This is by far the most extensive watering place in the Union. Of the effect of such establishments on morals I shall say nothing. The reader will draw his own conclusions, when he understands that the card-table, roulette, wheel of fortune, and dice-box are amongst its principal amusements. Here, not unfrequently, cotton bales, negroes, and even plantations, change owners in a night. The scenery around is highly picturesque and romantic. Declivities and mountains, sprinkled over with ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... of stock, of quick negotiations with a triple profit, of portentous balances. The amount of money that he was keeping idle in the banks was beginning to weigh upon him. He finally ended by involving himself in some speculation; like a gambler who cannot see the roulette wheel without putting his hand in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... I care, sir, how a man like you loses his money, and whether it is at hazard or roulette?" screamed the Baronet, with a multiplicity of oaths, and at the top of his voice. "What I will not have, sir, is that you should use my name, or couple it with yours.—Damn him, Strong, why don't you keep ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she was! But was there not something else? Oh, yes! Sadly she smiled. A clear conscience! She had forgotten that and that came first. Youth, health, lungs, looks, these were gamblers' tokens in the great roulette of life. In the hazards of chance at any moment she might lose one or all, as eventually she must lose them and remain no poorer than before. But her first asset which she had counted last, that was her fortune, the estate she held by virtue of a trust so guardedly created that if she lost one mite, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... indicated something flying round in a circle as he capered about. Ian's slightest gestures, like his father's, are very realistic, and I turned sick as I realized the game by which the silver had been won was probably roulette! Could it be possible? How had Mr. Vanderveer dared? No, there must be ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... judge then became the Saint Vincent de Paul of these grown-up children, these suffering toilers. The transformation was not immediately complete. Beneficence has its temptations as vice has. Charity consumes a saint's purse, as roulette consumes the possessions of a gambler, quite gradually. Popinot went from misery to misery, from charity to charity; then, by the time he had lifted all the rags which cover public pauperism, like a bandage under which an inflamed wound ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... was another name for roulette, and forms the subject of one of Rowlandson's early ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Gunsight's only gambling house. It had a bar, of course, and a Mexican string band that played from eight o'clock on; besides a roulette wheel, a crap table, two faro layouts, and monte for the Mexicans. But the afternoon was dull and the faro dealer was idly shuffling a double stack of chips when Rimrock brushed in through the door. Half an hour afterwards the place was crowded and all the games were ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) Il vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... useless to look for him here, and no other place seemed promising at this hour, there was nothing to do but pass the moments until time to change for dinner. Accordingly I watched the tables. Once, like most men of my age, I had been bitten by the roulette fever and had wrestled with "systems" in their thousands, not so much for the mere "gamble," as for the joy of striving to beat the wily Pascal at his ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... exclaimed, warming up with the notion of doing detective work. "I was playing roulette—but, ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... fortune, already much impaired, hung on chances as uncertain as those in a game of roulette? What nonsense! The failure of a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only death, but ruin, ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... into vapor within microseconds. Even a partial, low-efficiency explosion might leave the ship so weakened that it could not stand the stresses of return through the atmosphere. Firing on the enemy warhead at this range was not much different from playing Russian Roulette with a ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... is," resumed Frederic, "that gambling is one of the wants of civilized men. The 'rouge-et-noir' and 'roulette' tables are forbidden; the hells closed: but the passion for making money without working for it must have its vent, and that vent is the Bourse. As instead of a hundred wax-lights you now have one jet of gas, so instead of a hundred ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... several following weeks, the two partners played at cross purposes. Smoke was bent on spending his time watching the roulette game in the Elkhorn, while Shorty was equally bent on travelling trail. At last Smoke put his foot down when a stampede was proposed for two hundred miles down ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... a dance caller and everything like that, and a bar—but of course there 'll only be imitation liquor. But," she added with quick emphasis, "there 'll be a lot of things really real—real keno and roulette and everything like that, and everybody in the costume of thirty or forty years ago. Don't you want to buy a ticket? It's the last one I 've got!" she added prettily. But Robert Fairchild had been listening with his eyes, rather than his ears. Jerkily he ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... game? Now, take seventy-one; that's only one under fours, and I venture to say at least six of your holes are possible twos, and all the rest, sometime or other, have been made in three. Yet you never hear of phenomenal scores, do you, like a run of luck at roulette or poker? You ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... half. For the first time Camp Almy awoke to the conclusion that an experienced gambler was in their midst—one who had spared the soldier and his scanty pay that he might feed fat, eventually, on the officer. Rumor had it that Case's trunk contained a roulette wheel and faro "layout." In fine, long before orderly call at noon, in the whimsical humor of the garrison, he was no longer Case, the bookkeeper, but "Book, the Case Keeper," and every frontiersman, civil or military, in those days knew ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern of those employed to beautify genteel coffins, remove the cushions, and replace them with a wisp of straw, smash the springs, and put swing-leathers underneath instead, cover the whole article with a coating ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... to take them to the Casino to play roulette? Well, excuse my speaking so plainly, but I know how addicted you are to gambling. Though I am not your mentor, nor wish to be, at least I have a right to require that you shall not actually ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in my barrack received a miniature billiard-table, which became immensely popular. Cards, roulette, ping-pong and chess greatly assisted in passing the time. We also had quite a good camp library, the books mostly having been received from home. I often heard it remarked that life there was one long queue, ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... deuce do I care, sir, how a man like you loses his money, and whether it is at hazard or roulette?" screamed the baronet, with a multiplicity of oaths, and at the top of his voice. "What I will not have, sir, is that you should use my name, or couple it with yours. Damn him, Strong, why don't you keep him in better ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... woman with a military salute. In answer to a question, the small man turned and glanced toward Mose. The woman bowed and drove on, and Mose walked slowly up the street, lonely and irresolute. At the door of a gambling house he halted and looked in. A young lad and an old man were seated together at a roulette table, and around them a ring of excited and amused spectators stood. Mose entered and took a place in the circle. The boy wore a look of excitement quite painful to see, and he placed his red and white chips ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... wonder she'd be fussy, and he after bringing bankrupt ruin on the roulette man, and the trick-o'-the-loop man, and breaking the nose of the cockshot-man, and winning all in the sports below, racing, lepping, dancing, and the Lord knows what! He's right luck, I'm ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... WILLIAM CAINE'S newest story. He calls them Drones (METHUEN), but that, I feel, is a charitable understatement. There was Eric Wanstanley, rising young sculptor, who, because he didn't rise quickly enough, was capable of borrowing the savings of his friend's parlourmaid to work a system at roulette. The friend, Austin Jenner, was also an artist and also rising. His little failing was concealment of the fact that he was almost wholly supported by remittances furnished by his hard-working brother. Incidentally he was engaged to Eric's sister, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... that the great-bearded giant Emperor Wilhelm did drink heavily, fight hard, and mulct France mightily, is matter of history. This was the last year of the gaming-tables at Homburg. Apropos of these, the roulette-table was placed in the Homburg Museum, where it may be seen amid many Roman relics. Two or three years ago, while I was in the room, there came in a small party of English or Yankee looking or gazing ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... succeed. I expect to know everybody smart at Monte. That's what I've been promised, and Lady Dauntrey'll entertain a good deal. If that doesn't amuse her husband he can shoot pigeons, and gamble at the Casino. He's got a system at roulette that works splendidly on his little wheel. We were playing it this evening. But I expect I'm boring you. You look sleepy. I'll turn in, and go ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of pleasure, as he called it. With small success. Gaming soon ceased to attract him, for at the roulette table in Monaco he loathed the companionship of old professional gamblers with their gallows-bird faces, and of bedizened Paris courtesans, and at his club in Berlin or Baden, where he played only ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... Hillars. It is possible that he may be in St. Petersburg by this time, for all I know. You see," with an explanatory wave of the hand, "he's very uncertain in his movements. For the last six months he has been playing all over the table, to use the parlance of the roulette player. I have had to do most of the work, and take care of him into the bargain. If I may take you into my confidence——," ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... on spinning out incredibly complex directions for getting around in the quasi-city that was the Great Universal. At one point he thought he caught the man saying that an elephant ramp took guests past the resplendent glass rest rooms to the roots of the roulette wheel, but that didn't sound even remotely plausible when he considered it. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... said Bertram, "not to know that it's all settled by chance at roulette the night before the lists come down! If it's not, it ought to be. The average result would be just as fair. Come, Harcourt, I know that you, with your Temple experiences, won't drink Oxford wine; ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... combined saloon and gambling-joint. In one corner was a very ornate bar, and all around the capacious room were gambling devices of every kind. There were crap-tables, wheel of fortune, the Klondike game, Keno, stud poker, roulette and faro outfits. The place was chock-a-block with rough-looking men, either looking on or playing the games. The men who were running the tables wore shades of green over their eyes, and their strident cries of "Come on, boys," pierced the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service |
