Part 3

“I never saw anything exactly similar to that, but I had a run of luck once myself that seemed to me almost as curious. I went to visit a friend and there was invited to sit down at a poker game with some men I had never met before. The fact of not knowing the other players did not worry me, for I assumed that they were all friends of Harry’s, but it was not long before the fact that they did not know me began to worry me most confoundedly, for I never had such cards in my life before, and I don’t dare even to hope that I will ever hold them again. If the circumstances had been different and I could have felt free to play to win, I could have won big money, for they were playing an open game, and the limit was two dollars. At first I played my hands for what they were worth, and I won more than half the pots I played for--a big percentage when six are playing. But after a little I began to worry. It seemed to me that they must mistrust me, and I hesitated about betting as I ordinarily would. Still I kept winning and my pile of chips grew till I was positively ashamed of myself.

“Then I started to try to lose money. Fancy a man doing that at poker! I threw down a number of hands that were well worth betting on, and bet rather heavily on some that I was convinced were losers. Even at that I got fooled once or twice and took in pots that were not contested, when the other players would have won them if they had not grown cautious of my luck. Still, I was reducing my pile slowly, in spite of the cards I was getting, and would have reduced it still further if the ladies had not grown tired of their own society and come out to look at the game. One or two casual remarks by their husbands about my luck excited their curiosity, and two or three began looking at my cards.

“I don’t know what they thought of my playing, for I still refused to press my luck as even the most cowardly player would have done, but I know they were fairly astonished at the way the cards came to me. Over and over again I filled full hands, drawing to a pair; twice I held fours, and the flushes were as common as two pairs ever were when I played before. I played at random. I made wild draws and foolish bets, and threw down winning hands, but the chips kept coming my way till the situation became positively painful. That luck held till the game broke up, and, though I had honestly tried to keep from winning, I had seventy-five dollars cash to the good, over and above the stack I bought on entering the game. To make matters worse, one of the players had given me some unmistakably black looks, and in my embarrassment I felt certain that he took me for a card sharp, and I thought that the others would be likely to share his opinion.

“When we were all saying good-night, however, one of the players drew me one side and whispered:

“‘We were very glad to see you win that money.’ I was puzzled for fair, but I said:

“‘Well, I’m glad you’re glad, but why should you be? I didn’t exactly like it myself.’

“‘No,’ he replied. ‘I saw you didn’t. But didn’t you notice that the man that lost the most lost his temper also?’

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did notice that.’

“‘Well,’ he chuckled, ‘he is the fellow we have been trying all winter to catch.’

“That was a relief, but I never got over my regret that the easiest winnings I ever made at poker should have come when I was trying my best to lose.”

“I quite believe, as you do,” said one of his listeners, “that there is such a thing as luck, but do you think that it is affected by anything that we can possess?”

“Meaning a rabbit’s foot or a child’s caul, I suppose,” said the gray-haired young-looking man with a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t like to declare myself on that point, but I can tell you one more story that is true within my own knowledge. About five years ago I met a man on Broadway, whom I had formerly known as a speculator and a roving character in the West. He was a good fellow, with a reputation for being square that I had never heard questioned, and he had, when I knew him well, been unusually successful, so that he was very well off for a young man. I was therefore surprised to see that he looked very seedy. Moreover, he had a discouraged look which I had never seen on his face before.

“I questioned him, and he frankly declared that he was ‘dead broke’ and in trouble. He had tried New York in the hope of mending matters, but had decided that his best chance was to go West again. I offered to help him, but he would not borrow more than a trifle, which he needed toward his fare to Chicago. While he talked I noticed that he wore a small but very brilliant opal in his scarf-pin, and half-laughingly I asked him if he ever expected to have any luck while he wore that. It was not an expensive stone, but it was a very pretty one. He looked at me, half surprised, for a moment, and then he took the pin out and looked at it thoughtfully for several moments before speaking. At length he said:

“‘I don’t know that I ever had any superstition. In fact, I don’t know that I have now, but it is certainly curious. I bought that stone about two years ago, and everything I have done in a business way since then has resulted in a loss. I have lost some thousands more than I had, and have still to pay the debts. I think I’ll throw it away. The setting is worth the price of a dinner, I guess, so I’ll keep that.’ And he pried the jewel out with his pen-knife and tossed it into the gutter.

“I met him again last week, and he returned the loan, taking the bills off a roll that it would do you good to look at. He told me that his luck had changed the day he threw the stone away, for he received a letter that afternoon which put him on the track of a contract by which he made twenty thousand within a year, and that since then everything had prospered as it always had before he bought the opal.

“I don’t feel called on to say what I think about it, but those are the facts, and, to say the least, they are curious.”

Storms’s Straight Flush

_IT CAME NEAR COSTING HIS LIFE AND ANOTHER’S_

“I am not one who is disposed to quarrel with the inevitable,” said the gray-haired young-looking man as he lighted his pipe in the club smoking-room. There had been considerable discussion in the club as to the propriety of allowing pipes, but he had taken no part in it. He had simply kept on smoking his pipe till the others had settled the question, and when it was settled he continued to have nothing whatever to say.

“I don’t quarrel with the inevitable,” he remarked, “and I realize that changes of all sorts are among the things that are inevitable. Modern progress cannot be stayed, and modern improvements cannot be ignored. We have new business methods, new political doctrines, new translations of the Bible, and even the new woman, and there does not seem to be any possibility of ignoring them, or even getting away from them. I therefore make no objection to change of any sort, further than to cling to the old order of things myself, as far as I can. Aside from that I am strongly in favor of new-fangled ways--for those that like them. Indeed, I always think of what President Lincoln said: ‘For people that like that sort of----’”

“Oh! forget it,” said the man with his heels on the fender. “Excuse me,” he added, as the other looked at him in mild surprise, “but that is such an awful chestnut. What has provoked you to philosophizing?”

“Was I philosophizing? Well, perhaps I was. One of the youngsters asked me to join in a game of poker a little while ago, and I was going to do it, for I like poker when the stakes are not too heavy, but he told me they were playing with a joker.

“Now, they may get up a game of poker one of these days with high, low, big and little casino, and the right and left bowers in it, and it may prove to be a game that will be much liked by those who play it. Certainly, I will have nothing against it. But when I sit in at the game I want to play it as I learned it. So I declined the invitation.”

“Do you play it as you learned it?” asked the other. “When I learned, four aces couldn’t be beaten.”

“I must admit that point to be well taken,” said the gray-haired young-looking man, “for I can remember, myself, when a straight flush was an unknown hand. In fact, the first one I ever saw came near costing two lives. But the straight flush, though it was in its day a modern improvement, was a legitimate development and not a change in the game. 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 only reason it was not played from the first was that it had not been recognized as a distinct hand before. If somebody should discover a new hand--that is, a new combination of cards with a positive, individual character of its own, sharply distinguishing it from any other combination--that new hand might be admitted at its proper value without changing the rules.”

“There is a certain amount of interest in what you say, no doubt,” said the man with his heels on the fender, “but it occurs to me that there may be even more in the narration of the circumstances under which you made the acquaintance of a straight flush.”

“Now a ‘blaze,’” continued the other, “is certainly a distinct hand, but it seems to be a characterless sort of a thing, and not entitled to much respect. And the same may be said of the alternated straight. It is true that an effort was made to introduce the blaze, but it didn’t meet with much favor. I don’t think it is played anywhere now, and I never heard of anybody seriously proposing to play alternated straights. Come to think of it, the straight was not a part of the old original game, and was not universally played until within a few years. I don’t imagine, though I never figured on it, that it is any harder to get than an alternated straight, but it has a stronger character of its own. That proves what I said, doesn’t it?”

“About those two lives,” said the other, lazily moving his heels a little further apart.

“It was up in the pine woods of Minnesota. I went there one winter to escape a galloping consumption that my doctor predicted, and had secured a job with Brown & Martin, a firm that had several lumber camps in the woods. There was a gang of about forty men in our camp, and there was nothing particularly unusual about them, excepting perhaps that there was rather more card playing at night than the bosses liked to have. I don’t know that it is prohibited in any of the camps--certainly it was not in those days; but gambling is discouraged, for the men’s sakes as well as for the bosses’, and as a rule there isn’t much going on.

“The lumbermen are very impatient of restraint, though, and no intelligent foreman interferes with them much outside of working hours, and as there were half a dozen men in our camp who were inveterate gamblers, the infection spread until there were four or five poker games going on every night. Our foreman was a Yankee from Maine, a strapping big fellow, who did not play himself, and strongly disapproved of it, but he had a great amount of discretion, and beyond speaking his mind freely he did not try to stop it.

“This was thirty years ago, mind you, and, as I said a moment ago, the straight was not played everywhere. We played it, however, for there were a good many there who had become familiar with it, and they insisted on it, and the few who were disposed to grumble at it as a new-fangled notion submitted, though not with the best grace. If you remember, the straight, as played then, only beat two pairs. Its value as the lowest complete hand had not yet been recognized.”

The other man nodded.

“One of the men in the party I usually played with was Will Davison, a big, overbearing sort of man, who grew sarcastic whenever a straight was played, and who made it a point to throw down his own hand rather than draw to a sequence of four, calling attention to what he did.

“‘I have no use for a boy’s game,’ he used to say with a sneer, but the rest of the party overruled him, and he liked the game too well to stay out.

“One night a young law student from Columbia, who had gone West as I had for his health, joined our game, taking the sixth hand. Davison didn’t like that, either, as I noticed by his expression, but Harry Storms, the student, was a general favorite, and the rest of us all welcomed him, although we were a little surprised when he offered to play, for he generally spent his evenings poring over a law book, and we had thought he didn’t know the cards.

“We speedily found out that he did, though, and that he was not afraid to back his hand for what he thought it was worth. We played only a quarter limit, and as a rule we kept pretty well inside of the limit, too, so that it was not often that there was more than two or three dollars, even in a jack-pot. Storms, however, generally bet the limit when he bet at all, and as the boldest player generally sets the pace, we were soon playing a stiffer game than had been seen before in the camp.

“It was stiffer than I was used to, then, for I was only a youngster, and hadn’t played much, so I was naturally too much absorbed to notice for some time that we had attracted the attention of a number of other men, who crowded around us, watching the play in silence. When I did look up I saw Aleck White, our foreman, looking on with an expression of profound dissatisfaction, but as he said nothing I did not feel like quitting the game, especially as the luck was a little in my favor just then.

“Presently there was a jack-pot of one dollar and fifty cents on the table, and as it went over three or four deals without an open, it was sweetened up to three dollars and odd before Storms threw in a quarter, saying, ‘I open.’ I sat next to him, and, looking at my hand, I saw that I had aces up, so I stayed, of course. The next man stayed also, and then Davison, who was next, raised it a quarter. There seemed to be some good hands around, for everybody stayed, even after the raise, and there was nearly five dollars on the board before the betting began. It does not sound very exciting now, but, as I tell you, we did not play heavily. There were no professional gamblers among us, and the men were all working for day’s wages. A dollar meant more then than it does now to me, and it was a respectable sum to any of us.

“Before anybody drew cards Storms said: ‘Is there any reason why we shouldn’t raise the limit for this one hand?’

“I had suspected him of bluffing once or twice before that, and I thought this was surely a bluff. Moreover, I had a fool sort of confidence that I was going to get another ace, so I said promptly: ‘I haven’t any objections.’ Davison spoke quickly, too. ‘Suits me,’ he said, and the others, with a little hesitation, agreed: ‘Make it fifty cents for this hand only,’ said one.

“‘Oh, hell!’ growled Davison. ‘Make it a dollar while you are about it.’ I felt that this was too heavy for me, but I was too excited to object, and, as I said, the hands must have been pretty good all around, for no one else remonstrated, and a dollar it was.

“I did no better in the draw, and I had sense enough to lay down when Storms threw in a dollar, for he had stood pat, and I didn’t feel like holding up a bluff from where I sat. The next man had drawn two, and he hesitated, but finally put up his dollar. Davison held his hand pat also, and raised Storms a dollar. The next two laid down.

“Storms raised back, and my left-hand neighbor laid down, leaving the struggle to the two men. Davison raised it five dollars, and one of the men who had pulled out exclaimed: ‘I thought it was a dollar limit?’

“‘Well, what business is it of yours?’ said Davison savagely. ‘Storms is the only one that has a right to kick. If he is afraid to bet I’ll stick to the limit,’ he added with a sneer.

“Storms laughed. ‘I’ll see your five and raise you ten’ he said, putting up the money.

“Davison pulled out a wallet and, putting a ten-dollar bill on the table, said: ‘That’s all the money I have with me, but I’ll give you an order on my pay and raise you ten.’

“‘And I’ll see that the order is not paid,’ said the foreman, quietly.

“There was a moment’s silence, and then the foreman spoke again. ‘I don’t propose to interfere with anything you fellows do within reason, but I am not going to see you robbing your families.’

“‘He is right,’ said Storms. ‘I don’t want to play out of reason. Perhaps we have gone far enough.’

“‘Oh, well, if you are afraid,’ said Davison, insultingly, ‘I just make it a call.’

“Storms laughed again good-naturedly, and said: ‘Well, let it go at that,’ and he laid his cards down, face up.

“‘A flush, eh?’ shouted Davison. ‘That’s what I thought you had,’ and showing down a king full on aces, he reached for the pot. ‘That’ll beat anything but fours.’

“‘But my hand beats fours,’ said Storms, also reaching for the money. ‘It’s a straight flush.’ And so it was, jack high. It was the first one I ever saw in play.

“‘Straight flush be damned!’ exclaimed Davison. ‘Who ever heard of beating fours?’ And as Storms still attempted to take the money, Davison grappled him across the table, shouting and cursing violently.

“Storms struck one or two blows, and good ones, before any of us could interfere, but as Davison had him in a close grip he could not spar, and he seized the other’s throat, choking off his wind instantly.

“The foreman jumped in, of course, as did two or three others, but Davison had a knife out in an instant, and if he hadn’t been caught in time would have stabbed his antagonist. As it was, it was a difficult thing to pull them apart, for their blood was up, and they would certainly have killed each other if they hadn’t been stopped. When we dragged them apart they struggled like two wild beasts. And that broke up poker playing in that camp for the winter, for the foreman put his foot down hard.”

“And who took the pot?” asked the man with his feet on the fender.

“The foreman made them divide it. I don’t know as he had any right to, but his word was law with us then.”

For a Senate Seat

_A POKER GAME IN MINNESOTA THAT HAD POLITICAL IMPORTANCE_

“Poker has often been called the national game,” said the gray-haired young-looking man in the club smoking-room, “but I fancy there are few citizens who fully appreciate how much influence it has exerted on the destinies of the nation in one way and another. We hear stories now and again of the winning and losing of fortunes, and sometimes how large estates and mining properties have been staked on the chances lying between two hands. And every lobbyist in the country is familiar with the old device of losing large sums in a friendly game with a legislator whose vote is desired on one side or the other. Such things, naturally enough, sway public interests as well as private to no small extent, but I have seen a seat in the United States Senate lost on four queens.”

“Of course you are not talking seriously,” said one of the party.

“But I am,” was the answer, “seriously and literally. It happened in Minnesota soon after the war. Political conditions in that part of the West were very different to what they are now, and in fact all other conditions were, too. It was at about the beginning of the real growth of the North-west. The value of the wheat fields had been learned, but the Swedish and Norwegian immigration was in its infancy, and the lumber industry, that afterward grew to such enormous proportions, was then making comparatively few men rich. Minneapolis was a small town on the south side of the river, and St. Anthony was a town of the same size on the other side. Now it’s all one city, but at that time nobody dreamed of St. Paul being eclipsed in size or importance.

“I was knocking about late one summer at that period, and had made many friends around St. Paul and Minneapolis, some of whom were State officials, and I had heard much talk of the struggle there was to be in the next Legislature over the election of a Senator. Two men were in the race, and as they were both popular the contest was likely to be a close one. Party questions did not enter in, for the State was strongly Republican, and no Democrat stood a show. But which of the two Republicans would carry the Legislature was a matter of great doubt, and I saw bets made on the issue as early as the first of September. As the time of election drew near, it was evident that the choice for Senator was going to govern the nomination of candidates for the Legislature, and as both the Senatorial aspirants were long of head as well as long of purse they were using all the influence they had in the county conventions which were to be held early in October.

“Right there was where the importance of the lumber industry came in. The money on which the lumbermen in the upper counties lived came to them mostly through Minneapolis and St. Anthony, and the perfectly legitimate business relations between them and the business men of those two cities naturally gave the latter much influence among the former. There was a rollicking, happy-go-lucky man in Minneapolis whom everybody called Doc Martin, for no reason that I could discover except that he wasn’t a doctor. He was part owner of a saw-mill, and spent the most of each winter in the woods with his men. He was credited with being as influential as any one there was, among voters, but he had a rival in another man named Gilmartin, who was a logger himself, but had for a dozen seasons been foreman of one gang or another. Martin was a rich man, but Gilmartin was seldom flush, excepting in the spring, when he had drawn his winter’s pay. These two men were known to be strong partisans, one favoring one of the would-be Senators, and the other the other, and it was generally thought that they would both go electioneering when the county conventions were held.

“The week before that was to happen I was one of a party who drove from Minneapolis to a road-house on the Fort Snelling road near the Minnehaha Falls, partly for the enjoyment of the moonlight and partly for a game supper such as the house was famous for providing. Martin was one of the party, and as there were two or three other high rollers with us, I had made up my mind that it would be daybreak before we would get back.

“I was right, but before the night was over we had more excitement than I had expected. We had had the supper and an abundance of good wine with it, and were sitting around the table enjoying some rarely good punch when somebody proposed poker. No one objected, and in a few minutes there were two games in progress, for there were eleven in the party. Six played at one table, and Martin and I and three others were at the other. The game was a fairly stiff one, ten dollars being the limit, and the cards ran well enough to build up some heavy pots. We had all indulged freely enough to give ourselves thoroughly to the enjoyment of the hour, though we had not been drinking heavily, and there wasn’t a man there under the influence. Altogether it was a delightful occasion. Suddenly the door opened, and Gilmartin looked in.

“‘I don’t want to “rough in,” boys,’ he said, ‘but I stopped here to get supper on the way home, and the landlord told me you were here, so I thought I’d ask you to drink with me.’