Taking Chances Part 24

"'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 pa.s.s 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 ash.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ash.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.p, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 h.e.l.len, 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 h.e.l.len 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 h.e.l.len. '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-sc.r.a.ping 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.