CHAPTER XXIII.—WHEN I RAN THE SHOTGUN.
About this time the city of Providence fell midspasm in a fit of civic morality. Communities, like individuals, are prone to starts of strenuous virtue, and Providence, bewailing her past iniquities, was pushing towards a pure if not a festive life. And because in this new mood to be excellent it was the easiest, nearest thing, Providence smote upon the gambling brotherhood with the heavy hand of the police. The faro games and wheels of roulette were swept away and more than one who had shared their feverish profits were sent into captivity. Yea forsooth! the gay fraternity of fortune whose staff of life was cards found themselves borne upon with the burden of bad days.
For myself I conceived this to be the propitious moment to open a faro room of my own. I had been for long of the guild of gamblers yet had never soared to the brave heights of proprietorship. I had bucked the games, but never dealt them. It came to me as a thought that in the beating midst of this moral tempest dwelt my opportunity. Had I chosen a day of police apathy—an hour of gambling security—for such a move, I would have been set upon by every established proprietor. He would have resented my rivalry as a game warden would the intromissions of a poacher. And I’d have been wiped out—devoured horn and hide and hoof as by a band of wolves.
Under these new conditions of communal virtue, however, and with the clan of former proprietors broken and dispersed, the field was free of menace from within; I would face no risk more grievous than the constabulary. These latter I believed I might for a season avoid; particularly if I unveiled my venture in regions new and not theretofore the home of such lawless speculation.
Filled with these thoughts, I secured apartments sufficiently obscure and smuggled in the paraphernalia under cloud of night. The room was small—twenty feet square; there was space for no more than one faro table, and with such scant furnishing I went to work. For reasons which now escape me I called my place “The Shotgun.”
Heretofore I gave you assurance of the lapse of years since last I gambled at any game save the Wall Street game of stocks. I quit cards for that they were disreputable and the gains but small. Stocks, on the contrary, are endorsed as “respectable;” at stocks one may gamble without forfeiture of position; also, there exist no frontiers to the profits which a cunning stock plan well executed may bring.
In my old simpler days, I well recall those defences of the pure gambler wherein my regard indulged. Elia once separated humanity into two tribes—those who borrow and those who lend. In my younger philosophy I also saw two septs: those who lose and those who win. To me all men were gamblers. Life itself was one continuous game of chance; and the stakes, that shelter and raiment and food and drink to compose the body’s bulwark against an instant conquest by Death. Of the inherent morality of gambling I nurtured no doubts. Or, at the worst, I felt certain of its comparative morality when laid beside such commerces as banks and markets and fields of plain barter and sale. There is no trade (I said) save that of the hands which is held by the tether of any honesty. The carpenter sawing boards, the smith who beats out a horseshoe, the mason busy with trowel and mortar on sun-blistered scaffolds, hoarsely shouting “More bricks!” they in their way of life are honest. They are bound to integrity because they couldn’t cheat if they would. But is the merchant selling the false for the real—the shoddy for the true—is the merchant whose advertisements are as so many false pretences paid for by the line—is he more honest than the one who cheats with cards? Is the lawyer looking looks of wisdom to hide the emptiness of his ignorance? Is the doctor, profound of mien, who shakes portentous head, medicining a victim not because he has a malady but because he has a million dollars?
And if it become a question of fashion, why then, age in and age out, the gambler has been often noble and sometimes royal. In the days of the Stuarts, or later among the dull ones of Hanover, was it the peasant or the prince who wagered his gold at cards? Why man! every royal court was a gambling house; every king, save one—and he disloved and at the last insane—a gambler. Are not two-thirds of the homes of our American nobility—our folk of millions and Fifth Avenue—replete of faro and roulette and the very hotbed of a poisonous bridge whist? Fy, man, fy! you who denounce gambling but preach your own plebeianism—proclaim your own vulgarity! The gambler has been ever the patrician.
With but one table, whereat I would preside as dealer, I required no multitude to man The Shotgun. I called to my aid three gentlemen of fortune—seedy and in want they were and glad to earn a dollar. One was to be sentinel at the door, one would perch Argus-like on the lookout’s stool, while the third,—an old suspicious camp-follower of Chance,—kept the case. This latter, cautious man! declined my service unless I put steel bars on the only door, and as well on the only window. These he conceived to be some safeguard against invasions. They were not; but I spent money to put them in place to the end that his fluttered nerves be stilled and he won to my standard. And at that, he later pursued his business as case-keeper with an ear on the door and an eye on the small barred window, sitting the while half aloof from the table and pushing the case-buttons as the cards fell from the box with a timid forefinger and as though he proposed no further immersion in current crime than was absolutely demanded by the duties of his place. He sat throughout the games a picture of apprehension.
For myself, and to promote my profits, I gave both my people and my customers every verbal bond of safety. The story went abroad that I was “protected;” that no wolf of the police dared so much as glance at flock of mine. The Shotgun was immune of arrest, so ran the common tale, and as much as leer and look and smile and shrug of shoulder might furnish them I gave the story wings.