“All right, thin,” replied my father; “you can pla-ay, Jack, till you lose fifty cints; an’ that’ll do ye. Moind now! whin you lose fifty cints you shtop.” And so I was made one of the circle.
As I foresaw, I did not lose the four-bits which my indulgent parent had marked as the limits of farthest sacrifice to my ambitious innocence. Already I had brought back to Tom’s Run a curious trick or two from Pittsburg. It soon came to be my “deal,” and the moment I got the cards in my hands I abstracted the ace of hearts—a most doughty creature in this game of forty-five!—and dropped it in my lap, covering the fact from vulgar eyes with a fold of my handkerchief. That was all the chicane I practiced; I kept myself in constant possession of the ace of hearts and played it at a crisis; and at once the wagered dimes of the others began to travel into my illicit pockets where they made a merry jingle, I warrant you!
The honest Irish from whom I was filching these small tributes never once bethought that I might play them sharp; they attributed my gains to luck and loud was exclamation over my good fortune. Time and again, for I was not their equal as a mere player, I’d board the wrong card. When I’d make such a mistake, one of them would cry: “D’ye moind that now! D’ye moind how ba-ad he plays!”
“An’ yet,” another would add, “an’ yet he rakes th’ money!”
Altogether I regarded my entrance into this ten-cent game of forty-five a most felicitous affair. I won at every sitting; getting up on some occasions with as much as eight dollars of profit for my evening’s work. In those days I went willingly to Tom’s Run, quitting Pittsburg without a sigh; and such was my ardor to fleece these coaldigging comrades of my father—and for that matter, my father, also; for like your true gambler, I played no favorites and was as warm to gather in the dimes of my parent as any—that I was usually found waiting about the forty-five table when, following supper, they appeared. And it all went favorably with me for perhaps a dozen sittings; my aggregate gains must have reached the mighty sum of sixty dollars. Of a merry verity! silver was at high tide in my hands!
One evening as the half dozen devoted to the science of forty-five drew up to the table—myself a stripling boy, the others bearded miner men—my father complained of an ache in his head or an ache in his stomach or some malady equally cogent, and said he would not play.
“I’ll have me poipe an’ me mug av beer,” he said, “an’ resht mesilf a bit. It’s loike I’ll feel betther afther a whoile an’ then I’ll take a haand.”
Play began, while my suffering father with his aches, his tobacco and his beer, sat nursing himself at a near-by table. I lost no time in acquiring my magic ace of hearts and at once the stream of usual fortune set in to flow my way.
Ten years, yes, one year later, my suspicions touching my father’s illness and his reasons for this unprecedented respite from the cares of forty-five would have stood more on tiptoe. As it was, however, it never assailed me as a thought that I had become the subject of ancestral doubts. I cheated on and on, and made hay while the sun shone with never a cloud in the sky.
It was not noticed by me, but following a halfhour’s play and while I was shuffling the cards for a deal, my parent stole noiselessly behind my chair. He reached under my arm and lifted the corner of the concealing handkerchief which filled my lap. Horrors! there lay the tell-tale ace of hearts!