Clarence Louis Cullen

“ I'd rather take the chance of guessing what all of his five cards are than to engage in the perspiring business of trying to figure out the horrible possible value of the one blind card, especially if the four cards he has exposed are capable of being amplified into a hand of the topper kind by the addition of that bit of pasteboard in the pit. I can't get away from the impression that it's like putting all of your money in one bet to play stud. Now, there's a good deal to the game of draw besides mere bluffing. ”

“ The right people, knowing full well the old Springbok gelding's propensities, shove their big coin in on him anyway, and take a chance on him being unable to keep up with a steam roller after his swell race a while before, and the whole crowd fall into line and bet on Kringle until the books give them the cold-storage countenance and say, 'Nix, no more.' Then they get up into the stand and around the finishing rail and they see the aged Kriss, who's a rank favorite, begin like a land crab, when he usually goes out from the jump and spread-eagles his bunch. ”

“ The steamship company, you understand, is not the regulator of the habits of its steamers' passengers. If the passengers don't know any better than to play cards with sharpers, that is their own lookout. And a steamship company cannot decline to sell passage to a man because it claims he is a short-card player. It devolves upon the company to prove that the man is a card sharper, and the steamship people know that this is practically impossible, for no man who is done at cards by one of these men on an ocean steamship is going to rise in his seat and make announcement of the fact to the world. ”

“ If he is playing with a friend, and the friend is a winner from the go-off, as we say over here, all well and good. The American voyager who is up to snuff puts his friend's initial winnings down to the chances of the game. But when he gets into a game with a stranger, and the stranger simply shoves money from the outset over to his side of the table—well, do you know what the American of to-day does under those circumstances? He simply awaits the moment when the luck begins to change, and then he has an imperative appointment with his wife in the cabin. ”

“ There were plenty of men in that card-room who knew that the Indian was a short-carder, but men out that way aren't garrulous, and they pay a heap of attention to the job of minding their own business. The youth from Chicago was the merest mutt in the hands of the Indian, and he lost from the jump. He would stand pat on a full house, and the buck, drawing three cards, would still beat him after sky-scraping betting. A number of onlookers at the game may have seen the little side-plays of the Indian, but they only grinned at each other over the hopeless imbecility of the young man from Chicago. ”

“ It was while I was making this little journey, hitting a high place only once in a while, that I came to the determination that for a man who could not fight shy of bull-head luck any better than I could, the game of draw poker was altogether too exciting and spirit-ruffling for health and peace of mind ”

“ The tout was back at the side of the little man with the straw-colored mustache who believed in him just as the operator sung out: "Off at Gravesend!"
"Thay, Red," said the tout's little man, "which one of 'em did you put thothe five"——
"Rolling Boer at the quarter by a head!" sang out the operator.
"On that one!" said the red-haired tout, giving his thigh a whack with his bundle of "dope" books. "It's a pleasant outing for that one! He'll"——
"Rolling Boer in the stretch by a nose!" called out the operator.
"Thay, he'll curl up, won't he, Red?" ”

“ Now, here was a game that you wouldn't think a man with the sense he was born with would bet twenty cents worth of zinc money on. But this man Gately, who ran the squeeze-spindle for the Reeves-Pendleton layout on a salary and commission basis, was a pretty smooth gazzabo in his generation, and he landed the good things with his layout right along, and often for sizeable money. He was a quiet, red bearded chap, with a mighty convincing, persuasive way about him, and a man who'd put up a fight, too, in a corner. ”

“ I need the beers—ten of 'em."
"Yes, you're a sport right, I think nix," said the red-haired tout, walking gloomily away. "You're a dead game, with the copper on."
His eagle eye caught sight of a fat man with some three parts of a jag sitting at the "dope" table, alternately puffing at a ravelled cigar and nodding sleepily. This jagged man had on one side of his head a straw hat that looked as if it had been rained on and then sat on. The red-haired tout went over to him. ”

“ Any fool can go on playing when he is away ahead of his game, but it takes a man of unusual strength of character, perception and foresight to knock off when, after riding a high tide, he notices that it begins to ebb. ”

“ Luck is a full-bred sort of an affair, and it does not often run along hybrid lines. What I mean to say is that the man who has a huge run of luck at one game almost invariably falls into the doldrums and goes all to pieces when he switches to another game. The luckiest men I ever knew on the turf, for example, were the unluckiest card players, and most of them stubbornly spent a good many thousands of their pony winnings before they found this out. ”

“ This was my first visit to the slope, you know and, although I'd often heard vaguely that young 'uns, playing draw for beans or tin tags, once in a while shoved the joker into the pack for the fun of the thing. I, of course, never dreamed that rational adult human beings in any quarter of the earth could have the nerve to inflict such a dismal outrage upon the noble game of draw as to slap the joker into a poker deck. But I found out different the very first game of draw that I sat into out in San Francisco. ”

“ It was pretty, I tell you, to see that old six-year-old hop out after the galloping favorite and chase him down the stretch. The old horse, without a bit of whipping or spurring—the boy had simply given him his head—pumped up like an express engine, and the favorite was taken out of his gallop and extended, under whip and spur, before they were half way down the stretch. Passing the stand, Walcott and the seedy man's horse were nose and nose, the latter gaining at every jump. Walcott was beaten a head on the wire by the rank outsider in a pretty finish. ”

“ The thoroughbred running horse is a peculiar animal. While he is often beaten, the very wisest veterans of the turf have a favorite maxim to the effect that "The ponies can't be beat"—meaning the thoroughbred racers; which sounds paradoxical enough. Poker, too, is a mystifying affair, in that all men who play it appear, from their own statements, to lose at it persistently and perennially. There is surely something weird and uncanny about a game that numbers only losers among its devotees. However, poker-players are addicted to persiflage. ”

“ Why, the ocean voyaging card sharpers have become so well aware of this little shrewd habit of American passengers with whom they sit down to a game that of late years they have altogether abandoned that old, old trick of permitting their victims to win with ease at the outset. They only work that trick nowadays on Englishmen. Fact is, I think there ought to be a rule on all transatlantic steamships, English and American, absolutely prohibiting British subjects from playing cards at all aboard ship. ”

“ His name was Red Donnelly, and he had charge of the bookmakers' paraphernalia in the betting ring of the St. Louis fair grounds when the Lady Fortune beamed upon that nickel of his and invited him to bask for a time in her domain. He was a loose-jointed spraddle-shaped sort of a young chap of 25 or so who had been hanging around the St. Louis tracks from his early boyhood. He learned so much about the horses that he could never win anything on them when he played in the ten-cent books made by the railbirds. ”

“ Star Boarder at the quarter by a length! Star Boarder at the half by a length! Star Boarder at the three-quarters by two lengths! Star Boarder in the stretch by three lengths! And if that dog-goned, knock-kneed, bone-spavined, no-account maiden Fonso colt didn't just buck-jump under the wire by six clear lengths of open daylight, you can feed me hay and carrots until the next spring meeting and I'll only say thank you kindly, sir! ”

“ A race-horse can run on any old kind of a track. Say, you get tied up with this horse of the century business and you smoke stogies for a few months. Ethelbert, the horse of the century, hey? Say, d'je ever happen to hear of Salvator and Tenny and Hanover and Lamplighter and Henry of Navarre and Sir Walter and Raceland and Hamburg and a few old two-dollar mutts like that? Did, hey? Well, say, do they butt in? Say, Hamburg could've run backward as fast as this horse of the century that you people have all got the bug about. Kinley Mack! Kinley Mack! ”

“ But if I've got a pretty good fist full myself and am as good as any of 'em before the draw, why of course I draw to my hand. Just as quick as all the fellows that stay in pick up the cards they've drawn the dog does his little act all over again and tips me off on those that have filled their hands. Makes the game dead easy, don't it? If I wanted to play the scheme to its limit, which would be a fool trick and probably result in that dog getting himself stuffed and mounted by some loser getting next to his gag, I'd have too much money. ”

“ The queer crowd of players surged up to the counters to put their money down on things they liked, that figured all right in the dope books; but the sport kept his seat. His speculation for the day was over. He was simply waiting for his $2 to grow to $2,002.
Then they were off at New Orleans, as the telegrapher announced with a bored air, electrifying the crowd into silence. It was a six-furlong race, and there was nothing to it but Mint Sauce all the way. ”

“ Turf followers, as you fellows all know, have a habit of resurrecting themselves at inopportune moments when it seems that they are so deeply buried that they'll never struggle to the top of the ground again, and when they do run a shoe-tongue into a tan-yard they are more than liable to get hunk with former pals who have cast them aside in the hour of adversity. Now, it is a particularly dangerous thing for any man connected with racing to do business with a jockey. ”

“ He had never seen a horse race in his life, whereas Busyday was an old-timer and learned at the game, having seen three Handicaps and two Suburbans ran.
"They make kind of a lukewarm effort to keep the touts off the tracks," went on Busyday, disparagingly; "but the touts are too smooth for 'em, and they're always around, looking for good things like you, old man. All you've got to do is just to flout 'em from the jump, as soon as they edge up to you, and they'll shoo-fly instantly, rather than take chances on being spotted by the Pinkerton people. Tell 'em to go to the devil, that's all." ”

“ If he stands pat, it's up to you to determine by the mind-reading process whether he's simply bluffing or actually has a pat straight or full hand or flush in his paws.
"Well, out on the coast they've heard occasional rumors of such things as straights being played somewhere or another in the game of draw, but you won't meet one coast man in a hundred that knows precisely what the straight consists of and what the chances are of a man's getting a pat straight or of filling a one-ended or double-ended straight. As for playing straights, they've never even dreamed of such an absurdity. ”

“ But a man who'll lay up alongside of a brace faro layout or a brace wheel need not necessarily be sucker enough to hand his dust over to a smooth duck who's dealing a game that has all the scars, moles, tattoo marks and other perfectly visible Bertillons of a dead open and shut sure-thing layout. Yet I've seen men who were wise in their own business—horse-rustling, for instance—go broke against games that you'd think a ten-year-old would size up correctly without the assistance of an X-ray apparatus. ”

“ Abilene rather surprised me at first. I at least expected to have my hat shot off a few times in the course of an hour's rambling around, and, in fact, I was prepared to do a little impromptu dancing for the edification of Abileneites, who enjoyed toying with strangers. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the fellows hanging around the whisky mills and the brace faro layouts good-naturedly took me in hand and started in to give me a good time. I was a breezy young chap, you see, and able to hold my own in any public exhibition of the swelled head I unquestionably possessed at that time. ”