David A. Curtis

“ HOW A WESTERN CROOK HAD FUN WITH SOME SHARP NEW YORKERS
“I don’t know how far local pride may color the judgment,” said the gray-haired young-looking man, “but I am satisfied that very few New Yorkers would be willing to admit that an all-round sport could come here from the West and clean up the town, metaphorically speaking. That is, tackle the experts of the city at their own different games and win money from one after another without losing to any of them, and finally depart after a season of riotous success with his pockets laden with spoils. ”

“ Five men of better nerve never dealt cards than the five who sat playing poker the other night in one of those up-town club-rooms that are so quietly kept as to be entirely unknown to the police and the general public. The game proved to be phenomenal. ”

“ What is the matter with settling this thing with poker? We can play freeze-out, and three games will settle it, the winner dropping out each time.’
“The proposition caught me. You know I used to pride myself on my poker. After a little hesitation the others agreed. The man who proposed it had the cards, and we counted out six hundred coffee beans for chips and began playing on a blanket folded and laid on the ground. You would think the details of a game like that would fix themselves in the memory, so that I would be able to tell you every hand I held and every bet I made, wouldn’t you? ”

“ We had a club-house, eight or ten of us, that summer, which was located on Hicks’s Beach, on the extreme western end of the Great South Bay, not far from the Long Beach Hotel. It was about as unpretentious as any club-house need be, being only a shanty, but it was weather-proof, and with cots and hammocks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable when we slept ashore. More often we would sleep on board the little sloop yacht that we had chartered for the summer, for we used to cruise through the entire day, using the club-house as a rendezvous. ”

“ I never saw anything but poker played in the house, but the game was sometimes for tremendous stakes. Everybody seemed to have almost unlimited money who came there to play, for money was plentiful in Washington that year, and a thousand-dollar bet was no more an occasion for surprise than one of fifty dollars, though a five- or ten-dollar limit game was common enough,114 too. You could play a modest game if you liked, for there were several tables going every night, but if you preferred, you could generally get into a table stakes game and flash any sort of a roll you saw fit. ”

“ It was a part of his regular patrol of the boat, and he was as particular to see that nothing was going wrong at the card table as he was to see that everything was right elsewhere on the boat. Of course, poker itself was not considered wrong. It was part of the regular routine of life. A man could play or not, but a man who would object to anybody else playing would have been as lonesome as a prohibitionist in Kentucky. ”

“ The principle underlying draw poker is that a hand is valuable exactly in proportion to the difficulty encountered in getting it—that is, according to the smallness of the chance you have of holding it. Fours were supposed to be the hand that was the hardest to get, and so fours were the winning hand. When somebody discovered that the chances of holding a straight flush were fewer than the chances of holding fours, the straight flush took its place strictly in accordance with the rules of the game as already formulated. ”

“ The man who escapes drowning in such a way experiences one of the most extraordinary strokes of luck that can possibly occur to a human being. And it is almost inconceivable that such a thing would happen to any one man twice.
“Yet I know a man to whom it has happened three times. Captain Lowden White, of East Rockaway, Long Island, is a veteran seaman. He cannot swim a stroke, and when he is asked why he never learned, he cannot, or at least he does not, give any clear answer, but turns the question with a careless ‘I don’t know’ and a pleasant laugh. ”

“ Having won with money that was not your own, even though you did it inadvertently, you could not touch your winnings. But as to that which you won with your own money—Are you very sure that you will never play again?”
“Absolutely,” said the Lawyer.
“Then pocket your money. We have played together, we five, for more than a year now, and I doubt if you are much ahead of the game, even counting your winnings to-night.” ”

“ So when he had been coaxed along to a ten-dollar ante, with occasional bets of as much as five hundred, they knew that they could reach his uttermost limit easily enough, for he couldn’t have raised much over twelve thousand dollars in cash to save his life, without getting outside help somewhere. Twelve thousand dollars isn’t much of a wad to sit in a game with, if there is unlimited money against you, and the betting runs up into the hundreds, so Smith was on pretty thin ice all the time, though he didn’t realize it until it was too late. ”

“ Two4 of the players had laid their pocketbooks alongside their chips. They had not played so before, but the gambling fever had come upon them with the excitement of good hands, one against another, until the friendly contest had become a struggle for blood. Fours had been shown several times since midnight, and beaten once, while straight flushes had twice won important money. Deck after deck had been called for, and tossed aside in turn after a few deals, till the carpet was strewn thickly with the discarded pasteboards, but there was no change in the remarkable run of the cards. ”

“ Men who make national politics the game of their lives learn to love excitement, and next to politics, gambling is about the most exciting thing out. Some people even put it ahead of politics.
“I am the more inclined to believe these stories, too, because I remember a good deal about what happened in a certain poker club in that city a little while before the Crédit Mobilier scandal. ”

“ The Club’s Last Game
IT TAUGHT AN INTERESTING MORAL ABOUT RAISING THE LIMIT
“It is sometimes hard to draw the line between a professional gambler and another,” said the gray-haired young-looking man in the club smoking-room. “And even if you do succeed in making the distinction clear, the comparison isn’t always to the detriment of the professional. I remember an instance in a poker club to which I once belonged, which was interesting enough, though it pointed no particular moral that I know of, unless it was by renewing the old doubt whether the devil is always as black as he is painted. ”

“ In one or two cases I would have been glad to hear that the man giving his paper thus, had had the nerve to repudiate it and quit the game. One Congressman in particular I remember who might have been a man of distinction according to all indications, if he had been willing to shoulder the odium of an unpaid ‘debt of honor’ instead of lending himself to the lobby and accepting money for his vote. ”

“ My blood ran cold at the idea of riding out alone into that pack of fiends, but I realized that our only chance was for somebody to go, and I knew life was as sweet to the others as it was to me. Instinctively we began first talking about the way the man who should go should manœuvre to best advantage, before raising the question who should be the man. It took only a few minutes, though, for the scout to give his advice, which was for one to ride out, waving a white handkerchief. ”

“ Occasionally there would be some pretty big bets, but they all won and lost so nearly even that no one was much ahead. Then to an outsider it became evident that each of the other three was playing for Smith’s money, although Smith himself did not, I believe, suspect anything of the sort. As I said, the play was straight enough, but three first-class players can bring any ordinary player to grief easily enough in a four-handed game without any crooked manipulation of the cards, if they work in concert, and Smith was soon losing heavily. ”

“ Then Alcott and Keene made a movement simultaneously, as if to seize the money; but Downing was quicker than they. It was impossible to say where he drew his revolver from, but it was there in his right hand, while he coolly pulled in the money with his left.
“‘That was no square deal,’ shouted Alcott, though neither he nor Keene made any fight.
“‘Think not?’ drawled Downing. ‘Well, you ought to know. Your pal dealt the cards. But I think you are right. There’s been some queer play here to-night. But there’s one honest player in the party, and he isn’t hurt much. ”

“ It appeared from the published accounts that he had been a defaulter for some months, though he had concealed the fact by falsifying his books, so that he was really playing with stolen money when he pretended a superiority to Harry.
“I never saw either of the two men again,235 and as I tell you, we never had another meeting of the club. As for me, I have never played poker since for any considerable stakes. When the game gets so large that it is a question of money instead of the fun of the game itself, I always drop out.” ”

“ He was drawing to a flush, and somehow I felt that he had filled it. Of course I should have drawn to the strength of my hand, but I didn’t. I drew one card only, holding up an eight spot to my deuces, and I shoved all my beans into the pot without looking at my draw.
“He gave me one look, in which I read a perfect appreciation of what I had done,32 and without a word and without lifting his fifth card he pushed his chips forward. Then my nerve gave out. I grew as white as death, I know, though no one ever told me so, and I actually could not lift my cards. ”

“ That the game of poker flourished on the river as it never has elsewhere, before or since, seems entirely probable. I have seen games that made me hold my breath because of the size of the stakes, and because of the fact that I knew the players were all armed, and a shot or a stab was certain to follow a hasty word or a suspicious act. ”

“ Luck does change, though, and in a week he was losing, not heavily, but enough to whet his desire, and it was noticeable that he grew more and more eager for high play. The time had come for the decisive stroke, and Jones, of course, was on hand at the proper time to deliver it.
“There were only four players in the game that night, and it was played in the big parlor. The lobby never made the mistake of seeking privacy unnecessarily, and Smith, though he was infatuated with the game, was the sort of man to take alarm quickly at anything that looked suspicious. ”

“ The next freeze-out, between three of us, was a comparatively short one. It did not take more than twenty minutes for the scout to gather in all the chips, but short as it was, I managed to get myself together a little, though I was still full of the thought of the value of the stakes—a thing which, I have noticed, always interferes with my play. When I consider the value of a chip it always influences my betting one way or the other, even though I try not to allow it to do so, and in this case I said to myself that each bean represented the one hundred and fiftieth part of my life. ”

“ They came, and the plainsman put out his hand, laughing.
“‘You are a good one,’ he said. ‘What did you throw down four aces for?’
“‘My friend,’ said Overland Jack, ‘when you have played cards as much as I have you will know that there are times when four160 aces are not worth four cents. And when you have been through what I have you will know that it is damned foolish to pull the second gun. When you hear a click, and your own gun is not out, it is time to quit the game.’
“‘Well, you are a good one,’ said the plainsman again, and they all drank. ”

“ It did seem almost pitiful to see a man of his talents and character fluttering like a big fool moth around a flame that was almost certain to destroy him, but it didn’t seem to be anybody’s business to tell him what he ought to have known for himself. ”

“ I stood by, smoking and looking on for a few minutes, though I pretended not to be watching the game very44 closely. You can’t be too careful about observing the etiquette of the place you’re in, as I have always noticed, no matter what place it is, and the people around a card table are always liable to resent an outsider’s interest if it even borders on inquisitiveness. Where the resentment is liable to be expressed with a knife or a pistol, a wise man avoids showing his interest if he has any. ”

“ No game is too small for them, though they will play heavily at times, but they manage to live on their little skill by worming their way into friendly games of poker, such as are played all over the country, but perhaps more openly in the West than in the East.
“When Dick Bradley happened along our way and stopped over at our town, we had, though we did not realize it immediately, all the elements of a drama right at hand. ”

“ In fact, nobody thought about it after the interruption until it was too late for a showdown and the chips had all disappeared, nobody knew where. It takes a pretty serious happening to destroy all interest in a game of poker just at the moment when somebody has raised the limit in a big jack-pot and each player is confident of winning. ”

“ There was absolutely nothing in the game to distinguish it from any other of the hundreds of games that go on in the family circles of up-to-date New Yorkers every night. The limit was five cents. There wasn’t a player in the game who knew enough of card manipulation to deal a crooked hand, and there wasn’t one there who would have done it under temptation. ”