Chapter VIII: Part 8

"He began to win on the very next deal and at 2 o'clock in the morning he had not only retrieved his losses on the week's play, but he had all the money in the crowd. Baker was possessed of a species of intuition that was something extraordinary. I don't know what else to call it but intuition. I never saw him take a daring chance that he did not win out on it--chances that no professional gambler would dream of taking, and diametrically opposed to all of the rules of percentage in games of hazard. One night he walked into 'Don' Haskell's Madrid Club in St. Louis--this was in the fall of '59--and stood and watched a few deals out of the box at the $500-limit faro table. Then he reached over and bought five yellow--$100--chips from the dealer. He put them all on the ace and coppered the card. The ace lost, and the dealer put five yellow chips on the top of the original five on the ace, and waited for Baker to haul them down. Baker absent-mindedly made no move, to take the chips until the dealer reminded him of them.

"'Let them stand, with the ace coppered,' said Baker.

"'But it's $500 limit, Mr. Baker,' said the dealer.

"'Let it stand, Jack,' said 'Don' Haskell, coming up behind Jack and addressing the dealer. 'Let it stand as long as Mr. Baker wants to make play with the ace coppered, and we'll see if we can't commit assault and battery on his "intuition."'

"Baker nodded good-naturedly to Haskell and then waited for the turns on the ace. The ace was only half a dozen cards below, and it lost. The dealer ranged ten more yellows beside Baker's pile.

"'Let them stand, ace coppered,' said Baker, scanning the cases for a few deals back carelessly.

"'Don' Haskell nodded in the affirmative to the dealer and the other players at the table neglected to put any bets down in their interest in Baker's peculiar play. There was only one more ace left in the box and it came out a loser. The dealer stacked up twenty more yellows beside Baker's pile--$4000--and he and the proprietor waited for Baker to haul them down. Baker leaned back and lit a cigar, leaving the $4000 in yellows to stand.

"'I'll leave them there, with the ace coppered, if you're willing, "Don,"' he said quietly to Haskell.

"'The longer the better,' said Haskell, and the dealer began to slip them out. The first ace was way down in the center of the box, and Haskell looked a bit chagrined when it came out a loser.

"'Eight thousand, eh?' he said, looking over the stack of yellows on the coppered ace. 'One more whirl at it, Baker--that'll be about all I can stand to-night if you take it down.'

"The ace came out on the losing side again--a thing that no professional gambler would have bet on had he been offered 5 to 1 on the proposition--and Baker cashed in $16,000. He would have let it run again had Haskell been able to stand it, but the 'Don' had enough. Baker stood by and watched the ace come out a loser twice again and then he put $500 on it to win. It won and he took the boat for New Orleans with $16,500 of Haskell's money. Three months later, when Frank Caxton, Ned Ripley and Monk Terhune, a well-known New Orleans trio of tiger buckers, broke the Madrid Club's bank roll wide open, to the tune of $100,000, Baker was the man who started Haskell in business again.

"When I was dealing heavy games myself I used often to have a sudden feeling that it was time for some strong bucker on the other side of the table to cash in and quit, but of course it was no part of my business to make any such suggestions. I was dealing a game once in Washington, in the winter of '66, when the outcast son of a rich tobacco man of Richmond came along and whacked my box for $12,000 in a single night's play at $200 limit. I knew the young fellow pretty well, and I knew that since his father had run him out of Richmond he had had more than his share of hard luck. In fact, he had often been hungry, and I had often given him a $5 or $10 bill, being pretty flush myself just then. He had started in on my box with a shoestring--where he got it I don't know--and, as I say, he got me to the tune of $12,000 before I turned the box on him for the night. The man in whose interest I was dealing was very wealthy and a generous man. He knew the young chap's father. He came to me after the young man had left with his winnings and said:

"'You'd better hunt up that boy and tell him that he'd better not play any more. He's had his run of luck, and he's got enough to give himself a start. I don't want the money back. If he handles it right it'll do him more good than it would me. Just try to pound a bit of sense into the lads' head.'

"That was a pretty square talk to come from the throat of a man whose bank had been raided. I hunted the young fellow up that morning and told him about it. He was full of hifalutin' talk about wanting to give the proprietor of the bank a chance and all that sort of thing.

"'He can take care of himself,' said I to the boy. 'He knows your father, and I dare say he's clipped your father's bank roll for a good deal more than $12,000 on occasions when your dad has visited Washington and gone against the bank. Better array yourself in purple and fine linen, keep sober, and go back to the Governor in Richmond with a high head and a proper countenance. That'll be better than walking into Richmond in need of a Russian bath.'

"The fever was on the boy, though, and he couldn't keep his promise to me to stop. He came in that night, and in half an hour's play he ran his $12,000 up to $15,000. I kicked him under the table then, as a sort of final warning. He paid no attention to me, though. Then he began to lose, and in three hours he was flat broke. He went out with a wild light in his eye, and the next morning he was found dead in his little boarding-house room, with a bullet in his brain.

"It may be true, in the ordinary sense, that Providence hates a quitter, but that doesn't apply to gambling. The knowledge of when to get cold feet, and the gentle art of doing the same, are valuable assets for any man who tries to buck another man's game."

CATO WAS JUST BOUND TO PLAY POKER.

_And They Got Him the Whole Length of the Missouri, Until He Went
Against Another Game and Won Out._

"A man hunting for poker trouble could get a-plenty of it on the Big Muddy stern-wheelers around the latter sixties and the early seventies," said Joe Reilly of Sioux City. "There weren't many regular poker sharks working the Missouri River boats in those days like there were on the Mississippi steamers, but just the same the men that traveled on those weather-boarded, lop-sided old sand-bar wagons on the Big Muddy all knew how to play poker some, I'm a-telling you. Cato Bullman found this out when he went up against a whole lot of different men's games on the old 'Gen. W. T. Sherman' in 1872.

"Bullman was pardners with Nate Stillwater in running a big general store in Yankton, and both of 'em were making a mint of money at the time I'm going to tell you about. They'd ha' made more, I guess, if Stillwater hadn't drank too much whisky and Bullman hadn't played too much poker. Now, all in all, Stillwater handled his whisky pretty well, and at such times as he found it was getting a half-Nelson on him he'd leave it off for a spell and attend to business, so that his end of the dissipation of the firm of Stillwater & Bullman wasn't half as bad as Cato's. Cato loved to play poker so much that he'd knock right off in the middle of selling a bill of goods to a gang of freighters to go off somewheres and sit in a game. Now, this wouldn't have been so bad, even if it was darned poor business policy, if Cato ever won. But he never did. He had no license ever to touch a pack of cards. In the first place, he was a yap at cards, and any American kid that knew how to play old maid could have hopped out of the back of a prairie schooner and beaten Cato out of his boots at the game for money, marbles or chalk. In the second place, Cato was a natural born hoodoo. If he was drawing to three aces, and the other fellow was taking five cards, the other fellow'd beat Cato out and have plenty to space. So that it was just about up to Cato to holler murder and take to the brush whenever anybody flashed a pack of the pasteboards on him. But he didn't see it this way. He went right on playing poker and getting soaked for his share of the profits of the firm. Cato appeared to be just stone-blind to the fact that the foxy people that didn't do much of anything else around Yankton except to play cards were in a fair way to fix themselves with meal tickets for life at his expense, and as he was pretty near seven foot high and built in proportion, none of us felt like trying to kick any sense into his fool head.

"Anyhow, in the summer of '72 Bullman started down the river on the old 'Gen. W. T. Sherman' for St. Louis to buy goods. He had $10,000 in greenbacks along with him. Before he went aboard the boat Stillwater, who wasn't much more'n five foot high, ranged himself alongside Cato's big carcass, and says he:

"'Cato, this here v'yage you're about to embark on is a business trip and nothin' else. It ain't no jamboree and it ain't no poker picnic. There's some smooth people gits aboard these here mud ploughs down below at the landings, and in their hands you'd be nothin' but a great big moon-eyed jayhawker, which you are. So throughout this here journey you'd best git 'way up on top o' the boat and sit on a pile o' planks just abaft the pilot-house and smoke your pipe. You're not to play no poker at all, you hear me? When you git stuck on a sand-bar you can fish over the side for bullhead catfish, but you don't play no poker. If, when you git back here, I hear that you've been playing poker, I'll mangle you up a heap; now you hear me a-talkin'.'

"Cato reached down, picked up his partner by the scruff of the neck, and held him out at arm's length.

"'I ain't a-goin' to play no poker, old man,' says he to Stillwater. 'Won't touch no cards at all till I git back. Kind o' lost my knack at the cards lately, anyhow,' as if he ever had any knack at 'em. 'And you want to let the red-eye alone while I'm gone, too,' Cato finished, and then set his little partner down. Then Cato went aboard the boat. As I was going along down to St. Louis myself, Stillwater calls me aside and says to me:

"'Jest keep an eye on that big galoot on the way down, and if he gits restless and shows an inclination to get tangled up with a poker deck, jest bat him over the head with a capstan bar.'

"But I wasn't making any rash promises like that. Well, Cato was all right the first day out, and he followed his pardner's instructions and sat around on deck smoking his corn-cob pipe and feeling his big wallet occasionally. He kept as far away as possible from the little deck-house where a game was started going before the boat pushed out into the stream, but the rattle of the chips was bound to reach his ears occasionally. On the second day some stockmen got aboard that Cato knew, and Cato took a few drinks with 'em. Then they invited Cato into a little game. Cato looked at me kind o' guilty like, and then shook himself together like a man does that says to himself, 'It's nobody's danged business but my own.' So he sits into the game with the stockmen. They were only going down a few landings, and when they got off they had $2000 of Cato's money. I never in my life before or since saw such hoodoo luck as Cato had in that game with those stockmen. He didn't get a pair more'n once in a hundred hands, and if he did get a pair and happened to better it in the draw he'd give a hoot that 'ud wake up the owls ashore and then bet like an Ogallala Sioux with four aces and a dirk knife. It was just simply painful to watch Cato in that game, and no mistake. When the stockmen got off some of them actually looked so sorry for Cato that I kind o' thought they'd offer to give him his money back. But they didn't.

"'I'm kind o' out o' luck lately,' says Cato to me after the stockmen had got off with his $2000, 'and I b'lieve I'll just draw in now and wait for a hunch. No good buckin' agin' a streak o' bad luck, is there?'

"Well, I told him that if my 10-year-old boy down in Sioux City wasn't able to play poker any better than he, Cato, could before he put on long trousers and suspenders I'd send him up to a lumber camp until he became of age. But Cato didn't pay any attention to me, and when an awkward, overworked-looking man, dressed like a farmer, got aboard a couple of landings below he struck up an acquaintance with him. This farmer-like looking man had a pretty keen pair of eyes in his head, as I noticed, and he had besides that yokelly way of finding out about other people's business. So it didn't take him long to dig it out of Cato that Cato was going down to St. Louis to buy a stock of goods. The three of us were sitting on the hind rail, whittling, when this farmer-like looking man turns to Cato and asks him:

"'Ever play key-ards?'

"Cato looked at me again and hesitated.

"'Oh, wunct in a while,' says he, finally, and in a pair of minutes they were in the middle of a poker game. The stranger asked me to sit in, of course, but I could see that he wasn't over-anxious to have me in the game, and I never played poker on steamboats, stern-wheel or side-wheel, anyhow.

"Cato's hoodoo luck followed him right along in his game with the overworked-looking man, who seemed to me to have considerable of a job covering up a natural sort of deftness he had in handling a pack. The two played for three or four hours, the stranger announcing occasionally that he was going to get off at the next landing, so's to screen himself from the inference that he was getting cold feet, probably. He was about $1000 ahead of Cato's game when the boat was nearing his landing.

"'Hev to make it a jackpot naow,' said he, when the old stern-wheeler began to wheeze and snort a little preparatory to stopping at the landing.

"He dealt the jackpot hand himself and each man had $100 in the center of the table. It was to be sweetened for $100 each time the deal passed. But it didn't pass. Cato opened the pot for $100 and his Reuben-looking opponent stayed. The betting swayed back and forth until each man had $1000 up, and then the farmer-like looking man called Cato. Cato had three eights. The other man had three tens. The other man stuffed the bills from the center of the table into his overalls, shook Cato quite effusively by the hand, and went ashore.

"'Got enough?' says I to Cato when the old sandbar-bucker was once again under way.

"'Say,' says he to me, 'ye can't never jedge a man by his looks, can ye? That man knows a hull heap more'n you'd think, don't he?'

"'Got enough, Cato?' I repeats, for I wanted to pin him to the question in hand.

"'Well, I shorely am out o' luck, and no mistake,' was as far as he would commit himself.

"The next day a man who looked like members of Congress out my way used to look got aboard. He was dress in a long black broadcloth coat and wore a big black slouch hat, and he carried himself like a man that amounted to a good deal. He was amiable in his manners, though, and he hadn't been aboard more'n half an hour before he happened to fall into talk with Cato. Cato was a little sore about the loss of his $4,000, but this legislator-like looking man was so entertaining and sprung so a lot of good stories over the jug of good stuff which Cato brought out of his stateroom that Cato appeared to forget his troubles for the time.

"'Monotonous work, this steamboat traveling, isn't it?' says the statesmanlike-looking man to Cato after a while. 'I've only four hours traveling to do, and yet I've been dreading it for a week. What do you say to a little game of dime-ante. You play, of course?'

"Cato scratched his chin.

"'Durned if b'lieve I can any more," said he ruefully, and then, like the innocent big dogan that he was, he tells his new friend how he has already lost $4,000 on the trip down, and that he feels like hanging on to his remaining $6,000.

"'Oh, but only a little dime-ante game, you know,' says the man who looked like a member of Congress, and his eyes opened up a bit, I noticed, at the mention of the $6,000.

"'O. K.,' says Cato. 'Jest to pass the time,' and down they sat. I was asked in, but I told the statesmanlike-looking man that I had left my specs up in Yankton and therefore couldn't see the hands well enough to play. Well, the dime-ante and the dollar limit that they started in at lasted just until Cato got a whopping big hand, which happened to be given to him by the man that looked like an M. C.

"'Say,' says Cato then, looking a heap excited, 's'posin' we jest take the limit off'n this here game, anyhow, fur a little while?'

"'Why, certainly,' says his opponent genially, and Cato walks right in and wins $500 clean on that hand of his. He gives me a look out o' the tail of his eye that says, 'Well, what do you think of me now,' and the game goes on.

"Well, the M. C.-looking man begins to win quite a good deal then, and he, like the farmer-looking man, brought the game to a jackpot finish as the boat approached his getting-off place.

"'Fur how much?' inquired Cato, who was about $1,000 out already.

"'Oh, about $50 and $50 sweeteners,' said the man across the table.

"'No, we won't, either,' says Cato. 'We'll each put in $1,000, an' no sweeteners. That's jest as good fur you as 'tis fur me.'

"'Exactly,' says the distinguished looking man playing with him, and Cato dealt the hands. Neither man had openers. Then the other man dealt 'em. Cato opened it on jacks up on treys, and caught another jack in the draw. The boat snorted and wheezed preparatory to being made fast. Cato bet a flat $1,000 on his jack full, and the M. C.-looking man, looking kind o' impatient to get ashore, win or lose, calls him. Cato lays down his jack full with a grin at me--and says his friends across the table:

"'You do indeed, my friend, appear to labor under a blanket of ill-fortune,' and he spreads out his four nines and gathers in the pot. Then he hurries ashore, after shaking the crestfallen Cato warmly by the hand.

"'Got $3,000 left now, haven't you, Cato?' says I then, for it began to look to me as if word had been passed down the whole length of the Missouri River that Cato Bullman was traveling on one of its steamboats with money. 'Better let me keep that $3,000 for you.'

"'No, I'm durned if I do,' says Cato. 'Might as well lose it all now, devil take it,' and he gnawed on his fingernails, thinking about what kind of a story he'd put up to his partner, I guess, when he got back to Yankton broke.

"Well, Cato did lose it all, or close on to all of it. He foregathered with a man that got aboard at Omaha, and said he was a civil engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. The civil engineer got $1,800 of Cato's greenbacks, and then got off. Twenty miles below Omaha, at a little handing, a gappy looking hog raiser that Cato had met before climbed over the rail, and Cato thought he saw a chance to recoup his drooping fortunes. The hog raiser relieved Cato of $1,000, and had an important engagement to look at some fancy hogs at the next stop. This left Cato with $200.

"'Convinced that you're a damphool yet, Cato?' says I.

"'Dang'd if I don't begin b'lieve I am,' he owns up.

"'How about those goods you were going to buy in St. Louis?' I asked him.

"'I dunno,' he said, mournful like.

"Well, when we got to Leavenworth, Kan., the wheezy old Sherman tied up for twenty-four hours for repairs to the machinery. Cato was pretty gloomy. We went ashore and put up at the old Planters' House. On the night we struck Leavenworth I walked Cato around to sort o' relieve his mind. We were strolling down Shawnee street when we both saw a pretty much lighted up place into which a lot of well-gotten up men were going. When we came up to the place we heard the rattle of the chips and click of the marble and the choppy talk of the keno men, and then we saw that it was Col. Jennison's famous Bon Ton gambling joint, running wide open and full blast. Cato made for the door. I grabbed him by the sleeve.

"'Come out o' that,' says I. 'You've only got $200, which won't more'n get you back to Yankton. Haven't you been enough of an idiot already?'

"'I got a hunch,' says Cato, releasing himself from me and starting again for the door.

"'Hunch!' says I, but he was already inside.

"Well, Cato goes up to the faro table where the big men of the town seem to be playing bank, and says I to myself, 'Joe, you'll have to dig up to send this crazy man back to his pardner in Yankton.'

"Cato bought $200 worth of chips, tapping himself, and began. Gentlemen, he couldn't lose. He scattered his chips over every card on the table, and he couldn't lose. He won eight bets out of ten. He let his money lie on cards four times over, and won every time. He didn't use a copper, but played every card wide open. There didn't seem to be a split in the box for Cato. In less than twenty minutes he had won over $3,000. There was a $500 limit on the game. Cato asked to have it removed. When the limit was taken off, Cato made three $1,000 bets running, and won every one of them. Then he came off his perch and got down to $200 bets again, playing 'em like a veteran, and just simply unable to lose, gentlemen. The rest of the men at the table quit playing just to watch Cato. Once in a while Cato'd play the high card, just to see if his luck was holding. The high card came out every time he did it. They switched the dealer three times. They switched the lookout half a dozen times. They tried different boxes. They changed tables. They did everything. But, gentlemen, Cato Bullman was playing faro, and he couldn't lose. I was proud of the big duffer. In an hour he was $18,000 ahead of Col. Jennison's bank. They sent across the way to get Col. Jennison who was playing a quiet little game of poker in the Star of the West saloon. Col. Jennison came over to the Bon Ton and sat down to handle the box for Cato himself. Cato soaked Col. Jennison every bit as hard as he had soaked all of Col. Jennison's dealers. Col. Jennison was game, but, when at the end of three hours, Cato was still going right ahead winning like a cyclone, he turned the box over with this little remark:

"'Gentlemen, the game is closed for the night.'

"When Cato cashed in he had just $35,200. I took him by the arm and walked him down to the hotel and got him into his room. Cato went to the basin to wash his hands. When he turned around to me again he looked into the barrels of both my guns.

"'Cato,' says I, 'I'm sorry, but I'll just trouble you to hand over every cent of that $35,200 you've got, right away now, darned quick, or I'll blow the whole top of your head off.'

"Cato didn't demur a little bit. He plunked the money down--most of it was in $1,000 and $500 bills--on the table.

"'I don't suppose I've got enough sense to pack it around, fur a fac',' said he.

"When we got to St. Louis I handed Cato $10,000 to buy his goods with, and expressed the $23,200 to his address in Yankton.

"'Well,' said his little pardner, Stillwater, when Cato got back to Yankton, 's'long as you won, you big clod-hopper, I don't s'pose I need to mangle you up none. But if you had lost!'"

FINISH OF AN EDUCATED RED MAN.

_He Was Too Handy with the Pasteboards, Wherefore He Arrived Prematurely
in the "Happy Hunting Grounds."_

"It happens more or less frequently," said a traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "that an educated buck Indian degenerates in the long run into a bad proposition. I'm thinking particularly of an educated Oregon Indian, about a three-quarter blood, who got the big-head so bad after he had been polished off mentally back this way that he never mixed up with his people when he returned from the East. He was a Umatilla. He was first sent to Carlisle, and when he had finished there he was passed on to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, to take the law course there. It was in view that he was to become the attorney for his tribe upon the conclusion of his Blackstone-thumbing. He squeezed through the law at Johns Hopkins, and then he was told of the nice fat thing that awaited him out among his own people. He turned the proposition down cold. He said flatly that he had no intention whatever of mixing up with his own bunch at all any more. He likewise remarked that he knew his gait, and that he intended to follow it.

"A couple of months after he quit Baltimore he turned up at The Dalles in Western Oregon and settled down to the career of a short poker player. Where he had picked up the game it would be hard to say; but he certainly was a daisy at it. There wasn't a kink in the game that he didn't have the hang of. Now, The Dalles isn't any bad man's camp; it is a very beautiful health resort in the Cascade Mountains, on the south bank of the Columbia River; there wasn't a hard character in the place until this educated buck established his headquarters there; and it suited his game to a T. He made it his business to nail young tourists who didn't have any more sense than to sit into a poker game with a stranger, much less an Indian, and an educated Indian at that; and he just stripped them in sets of fours for several years. He was a splendid-looking buck and he dressed as men dress who've got the money to tog themselves out right back this way. When he was engaged in the act of getting a new victim he knew how to throw much cordiality and some grace into his manners; but ordinarily he was a sulky, morose, bad Indian. 'Way down in the deeps of him he was a rank coward, for he never tried to twist his tentacles about a man who he thought would make a stand, much less a scrap, upon discovering that he was being done; he always picked out palpable lily-livers who looked, to his shrewd eye, as if they would stand for anything rather than mix it up with him.

"It did not take the square people of The Dalles long to get next to the fact that this educated Indian, who had coolly taken up his abode among them, was a cheat and a swindler, and that his sole occupation consisted in fleecing pulp-headed young tourists. They talked a great deal of giving him the razzle-dazzle and chasing him out, but somehow or other this suggestion never came to a head. The men at The Dalles who had the interest of the place at heart would point the swellerino buck out to young strangers who looked as if they might be likely victims of the Indian short-card fleecer, and tell the young goslings just where and how the buck stood. It may sound incredible, but even after being warned in this fashion a whole lot of the young addlepates fell into the buck's mesh and got themselves done to a proper turn by him. They were able to take care of themselves, they would reply chestily to their warners, and, just to prove it, they'd take a hack at the Indian's game. When they got through they'd be smoking punk tobacco in pipes while the Indian would be blowing the smoke of perfectos in their faces, and they'd stand for their craggy end of it without a whistle. The buck was 6 feet 3 inches high and weighed 235 pounds, and he looked like a macerator from the high ridges. So he was never called by any of his Dalles victims, even when they knew the details of how they'd been plucked. One poor little devil of a rich man's son from Omaha whimpered one night when the Indian had removed about $800 from him by dealing from both ends and the middle of the deck, and he said to the buck piteously:

"'I just hope you've played fair, that's all.'

"The Indian reached over and struck the pollywog with all of his force on both sides of the face with his two open palms, leaving the blood-red welt marks of his fingers on the lamb's fair cheeks. The whining victim drilled for his life up the hotel stairs to his room, and the Indian looked after him sardonically. There wasn't a man about that didn't know that the Indian had scandalously cheated the lad, but not a one of them said a word. There was a keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man, a stranger, standing at the hotel desk reading a just-arrived letter, when the thing happened. His face flushed angrily when he saw the burly Indian slap the undersized fool of a boy, and he turned to the hotel clerk and remarked:

"'Is this the real thing here? Does the gang stand for that kind of work on the part of a mud-hided raw-meater?' There was plenty of contempt in the way the stranger spoke.

"The clerk shrugged his shoulders. 'We can't undertake to cut in on any of the plays of our guests,' he replied. 'We just board and lodge 'em, that's all. If they're jays enough to mix up with grafters, it's their game, and we're not asking for any rake-off, one way or the other.'

"The stranger muttered something about a chicken-livered population, and strolled out. He took his train an hour or so later.

"At certain seasons of the year, when there wasn't must doing in his line at The Dalles, owing to periodical scarcities of pluckable tourists, the Indian would hit up Baker City, Pendleton, and other Oregon towns in search of good things, and a couple of times a year he included Olympia and Walla Walla in his itinerary. He sung somewhat smaller in those places than he did at The Dalles, but by keeping his eye skinned for men liable to call the turn on him and working quietly he generally succeeded in pulling apart at least one jelly-fish in each of the towns he took in on these off-season tours.

"About three months after he had left the marks of his fingers on the lamb's face at The Dalles--this was in the fall of '92--he turned up one day at Walla Walla. He strolled around the hotel corridors with an eye to business, and along toward night he met with a young fellow named Hellen, whose father, a wealthy Chicago man, had recently foreclosed a mortgage on a big ranch about sixty miles from Walla Walla. The son, a rather raw young chap, had come out to look the ranch over, and the Indian got next to him as soon as he struck the town. The buck was an expert billiard player, and he suggested a game of pin billiards to the young Hellen chap. He played off on the youth, and soon got him to betting on shots. After losing about a dozen $5 bets on shots, the Indian socked it to the young man from Chicago by betting $300 that he could execute a certain difficult shot. It looked like board and lodging to the young man that the Indian's $300 would spin into his clothes, so he put up $300. The Indian made the shot with consummate ease and took down the pot.

"'Fluke!' said young Hellen. 'I'll go you another $300.'

"The buck got this bunch, too, without half trying. It would naturally be thought that the tenderfoot would have smelt a rat by this time. But he didn't. He had plenty of money, and probably he considered it piquant to lose his coin to a swagger-looking, educated Indian. Anyhow, the two were playing poker in the card-room of Walla Walla's stag hotel half an hour later.

"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.

"Finally the Indian, perhaps losing some of his dexterity from the drinks he was steadily absorbing, over-stepped himself. He filled two pairs from the discard and he did it clumsily. The young man with whom he was playing saw the move.

"'I say, there,' said he, 'what are you doing there, you know?' pointing to the discard. 'Didn't you--er--didn't you make a mistake and take a card out of that pile?'

"The Indian, who was about $1,600 to the good, had cold feet, anyhow, and so he threw his hand face downward on the table and glared at the Chicago boy. The Chicago boy quailed.

"'Er--well, maybe I made the mistake myself'--he started to say, when a big voice cut in with:

"'No, you didn't son. You didn't make any mistake at all. You're up against the real thing in the way of a mud-skinned short-riffler, that's all.'

"A keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man was the speaker. As he spoke he reached down from behind the Indian's chair and got two huge hands around the buck's neck. The onlookers formed a clearing. The Chicago youth got himself on the outskirts of the bunch.

"'About three months ago,' said the keen-eyed man, dragging the huge, half-choked Indian to his feet, 'I saw you at The Dalles leave the prints of your dirty fingers on the face of a little whiffet you had just fleeced. I hankered then to confer a few personally conducted slaps of my own make and manufacture on your coppery jowls, but for some reason or other I passed the hanker up on that occasion. Well, the slaps are coming to you now. It's better late than never, and I'm going to slap you into jerked beef just for luck.'

"The buck was finally up against the real thing, and he knew it. I'll bet that his face was whiter than mine is now when the big-framed man, who had the devil of anger lurking in his eyes, suddenly loosed his right hand from around the Indian's neck, and, still clutching him by the left, swept the loose arm back for the momentum and brought his heavy palm smack against the buck's left cheek with a noise that sounded like the explosion of a charge of blasting powder. The slap rattled the Indian's teeth and made his big head joggle from side to side like the head of an automaton. Clutching the Indian's throat again then with his right hand, the big-framed man repeated the slapping performance on the Indian's right cheek with his left hand, and left a welt there that might have been made by a cat-o'-nine tails. The buck was too dazed, in the first place, by the suddenness of it all, to make a move: in the second place, he was too cowardly. The big-framed man--he was an expert mining engineer from Nevada, and his name was Varus Pryor--slapped the Indian's face, first with his right and then with his left, for three minutes, with all his might, and then, getting behind the buck, proceeded to slap him into the street. With first one hand and then the other clutching the collar of the Indian's coat, he slapped him out to the front door of the hotel. Then he gave the buck the knee in the small of the back, and hoisted him across the pavement to the middle of the street, where the Indian spun around and fell for a moment.

"'I don't care what the Indian Bureau says about it,' said the keen-eyed man, standing in the doorway of the hotel. 'God Almighty never intended that white men should stand for such alligators as that copper-mugged swindler, and'----

"'Stand clear, pard, he's going to plug you!' shouted a man from a second-story window of the hotel.

"The Indian, pretending to be hurt, and only half risen to his feet in the obscurity of the middle of the street, had got his gun out, and the yell from the second story reached Pryor just in time. As it was, the buck planted a ball in the front door of the hotel, only two inches above the big-framed man's head. By that time Pryor's gun was working, and he drilled six holes forty-eight hundredths of an inch in diameter plumb through the swindling Umatilla's chest. Forty-five minutes later he was acquitted by a coroner's jury on the grounds of self-defense and justifiable homicide--a two-in-one verdict.

"This," concluded the traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "was the finish of just one mentally-burnished buck Indian, and I know of several others."

THE UNCERTAIN GAME OF STUD POKER.

_Story of a Seance at Stud Between Two Oregon Contractors and the Close
Finish Thereof._

"Somehow or another, I don't like the game of stud," said a Government contractor from Portland, Ore. "It's too much of a strain to play stud. There are too many heart-breaking and headache-producing possibilities attached to the mysterious card the other fellow has got in the hole. 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. In fact, bluffing is almost an obsolete feature of the game among the experts at draw poker. The man that plays his hand in draw will beat the bluffer every time in year-in-and-year-out play.

"The folks out my way had the stud-poker fad pretty badly about eight or ten years ago, but now they've got back to their first love and stick pretty generally to the game of California draw--which, by the way, is a whole lot different game from the draw you people back here play. For example, a man sprung a thing on me last night that he called a pat straight. I had three aces, but he said his pat straight topped me, and as he had his gang with him, I had to look pleasant and let him rake in the money. If a man out on the Slope were to talk pat straight to a party of aborigines, they'd conduct him to the Alcalde's calaboose and have him locked up to await a commission's decision as to his responsibility.

"But to get back to the period when the stud-poker fad got hold of us out in Oregon. I was a witness of a heart-disease finish of a game of that kind a few years back that caused me to decide that ordinary draw was good enough for my money right along. It was right after the big fire that ate up the best part of The Dalles eight years ago. As soon as the building contractors of Portland got word to the effect that The Dalles was being licked up by the flames, they hopped aboard trains and made for The Dalles with an eye to business. They knew that The Dalles, which was chiefly a wooden layout before the fire, would be immediately rebuilt in brick and stone, and that the contractors who got on the scene of ruin first would scoop in the bulk of the business. Two of these contractors were--well, I'll have to side-step on their names, for they're two of the most prominent citizens out on the banks of the Willamette, and both of 'em walk up the middle aisle on Sunday as if they never heard of such a thing as stud poker. Both of them are Irishmen, which is why neither of 'em could see that he was licked on this occasion.

"One of them, we'll say, was Dan Carmody, and the other was Tim Feeney. Carmody got into The Dalles a few hours ahead of Feeney, and he made those few hours count. He went around to the business men of The Dalles who had been wiped out by the fire and asked them what they wanted with him. They hadn't burned the wires up telegraphing for Carmody to come to them, but Carmody about convinced them that they had done just this thing, and he began making estimates for 'em with pencil and pad. He corralled them in the one remaining hall of the town and told them to go ahead and just let him know what they wanted of him. Carmody's cyclonic nerve appealed to their fancy, and they found themselves juggling with the figures Carmody was putting down on his pad. Three hours after Carmody struck The Dalles from Portland he had in his inside coat pocket rough drafts of contracts to build a new stone business block, including a theater, and also to erect a large, ornate hotel, the cost of both buildings to be not more than $350,000. Oh, Carmody was a hustler all right.

"He had an idea that his friend and business rival, Tom Feeney, would be down on the next train from Portland, and he went to the station to receive him. Sure enough, Feeney stepped off the next incoming train. Carmody had his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and a big cigar stuck aggravatingly in his teeth when Feeney ran into him. Feeney's jaw fell.

"'When did you get in, Dan?' he asked Carmody.

"'Three hours ago,' replied Dan, with a grin.

"Feeney made a funny motion, as if to jump aboard a train that was just pulling out for Portland, but he came back to his cheerful rival and asked him:

"'Anything doing, Dan?'

"Carmody executed two very shifty jig steps in token of his happiness, and then reassumed his dignity.

"'Well, I'll tell you how it is, Tim,' he said. 'These people here are pretty badly chewed up, y' see. Now, maybe they'll be wanting to rebuild a few chicken coops and outhouses--I don't know but what they will. Now, there's a chance for you, Tim.'

"Feeney didn't look very merry over this. Says he: 'Chicken coops, is it? And who's going to throw up the new business building and the opera house, and the hotel, and the like?'

"Carmody was laying for that question. He drew the two rough contracts out of his pocket.

"' Looks as if I'm It over here, don't it, Tim?' he asked Feeney, as the latter read over the two contracts with a gloomy countenance. 'Nice work, hey? That's what you get for monkeying around in bed all the morning, Tim. Why don't you be like me, now? I never go to bed,' etc. Carmody couldn't refrain from working that nice edge of his, and strung the dismal-faced Feeney for keeps. Feeney finally walked away, the picture of dejection, to see if there were any crumbs to be picked up in the way of rebuilding. He found, however, that all of the business men that had not already been got by Carmody were disposed to wait awhile for the disposition of insurance, and he didn't get a smell of the rebuilding. He walked around the still-smoking Dalles for the remainder of the day, figuring on how much Carmody was going to make out of his two big contracts. Carmody himself started in to open wine by way of celebration, so that by the time the night boat for Portland was ready to leave her slip he was pretty comfortable. Both he and Feeney took the night boat and I happened to be going down to Portland on the boat myself that night. Feeney had taken the bowl himself a bit during the day to assuage his depression over his lack of success, and he was pretty mellow when the boat pulled out. Carmody, with about a dozen quarts under his belt, dug Feeney up as soon as he got aboard, and the two walked up and down the main deck, arm in arm, Carmody keeping up his merciless stringing of his friend. Then Carmody heard the clatter of the chips in a $10 limit game of stud that had already started in the card-room, and suggested a two-handed game of stud to Feeney, with some accommodating non-player to deal the cards. Feeney was agreeable, and Carmody, seeing that I wasn't mixing up with the game in the card-room, asked me if I wouldn't dish 'em out for an hour or so of stud between himself and Feeney. It was to be $100 limit and $10 ante. The two men didn't get up to the $100 limit at all until after they had played for half an hour, and Carmody was $600 or $700 winner. Then Feeney found himself with kings up on tens in front of him and a card that he either liked or elected to bluff on in the hole, while Carmody had three aces face up and a card in the hole that he appeared to think a heap of, judging from the way he bet.

"'These kings of mine,' said Feeney, with the transparent air of a man making a win-out bluff, 'may not look very pretty alongside those three bullets of yours, Carmody, but they suit me, at that. You can have a peep at the blind for $100.'

"'I wouldn't think of paying so little money for the privilege of gazing at such a good card as you think you've got, Tim,' said Carmody. 'Now, having already got you beat on the show-up, I guess I can afford to charge you another $100 for a glimpse of the other one-spot that I've got in the pit.'

"This kind of talk went on for ten minutes, the two men raising each other back at $100 a clip until there was $3800 in the pot. Feeney talked and acted like a bluffer all the time, but nevertheless Carmody began to suspect that, after all, Tim might have something in the hole to beat him. So when Carmody called Feeney's last $100 raise the latter knew that his friend with the contracts in his pocket didn't have any four aces, and he just scooped in the pot before he showed up what he had in the hole. It was the third king, completing a nice full hand, that Feeney had in the hole, and the money was his. Carmody turned up a deuce, that he had tried to make the bluff was another ace, and looked properly crestfallen.

"'For a Mulligan that knows so little about business as you, Tim,' said Carmody, 'you've got a mighty crafty way about you of making it appear that you're bluffing. We'll try it again, and from now on I'll know that when you look and talk like you're bluffing you've got the hand.'

"Both men had been ringing up the steward's boy a good deal, during the progress of the game, and they were not, therefore, any more sober than was necessary. On the very next hand Feeney took a big hunk out of his rival. He had three deuces face up and Carmody had three jacks on top. Feeney began to bet $100 with so much natty confidence that Carmody decided that his compatriot was adopting new tactics in bluffing, and, quite naturally, with his three nice-looking jacks plainly in sight, he not only stood every raise but raised back the limit every time.

"'I figure it this way,' said Carmody, abstractedly to himself, when there was nigh onto $4000 in chips in the center of the baize. 'This Harp from Connemara across the table can't turn two of these tricks one right after the other. The percentage of the game is against such a thing as that. And he's just perky and sassy because he thinks I'm on to his first exhibited system of bluffing. Tim, another $100, if you want to feast your Mulligan blue eyes on this other knave of mine in the hole.'

"'And $100,' said Feeney, with all the confidence in life.

"Thus they went on for fully fifteen minutes, until the proportions of the pot were really alarming, considering that neither of the men was a millionaire or anything like it. There was $7200 in the middle of the table when Carmody wilted. He attempted to put his wilt on philanthropic grounds.

"'With a drink or two in you, Tim,' he said, 'you're an incautious and unwise citizen for a man humping along toward 60 years of age'--Feeney wasn't more than 48, and didn't look that. 'And Mrs. Feeney's been telling my wife for the past twelve years that she's aching to have a look at the old sod, but that her man Tim considers himself too poor for the journey. So I won't be the means of casting gloom around your household, Tim. I see your $100, and what's the color of that cheap ten or eight spot you've got in the hole?'

"Feeney turned over his fourth deuce and hauled down the money. That sort o' took Carmody's nerve and he had to have several big drinks of the hard stuff to set him right again. While he was drinking Feeney took up the end of the stringing that Carmody had abandoned.

"'How much do you figure you'll pull down from those two contracts, Dan?' he asked his rival in business.

"'About $75,000,' answered Carmody quickly, 'which is just about $75,000 more than The Dalles fire has been worth to you, eh, Tim?'

"'What's the use of depleting the capital that you've already got in bank?' asked Feeney, with a twinkle in his eye. 'Just play me stud for those contracts. I'll say they're worth $60,000, and I'm good for that if I'm good for a cent.'