With these words, Joe got a deck of cards and began a game of casino with me as an adversary. Slowly playing the cards, he explained and strove to illustrate those mental methods by which he kept account and tabbed them as they were played. If I could lay bare this system here I would; but its very elaboration forbids. It was as though Joe owned a blackboard in his head with the fifty-two cards told off by numbers in column, and from which he erased a card the moment it appeared in play. By processes of elimination, he came finally to “Tell the last four,” and as the last hands were dealt knew those held by his opposite as much as ever he knew his own. This advantage, with even luck and perfect skill made him not to be conquered.
It took many sittings with many lessons many hours long; but in time because of my young faculties—not too much cumbered of those thousand and one concerns to come with years and clamor for remembrance—I grew as perfect as Joe.
And it was well I learned the secret when I did. Soon after, I became separated from Joe; I went southward to New Orleans and when I was next to New York Joe had disappeared. Nor could I find trace or sign of his whereabouts. He went in truth to his old village, and my earliest information thereof came only when the tavern host told the origin of the club-swinging ballet dancer then toeing it so gallantly on his gables.
But while I parted with my friend, I never forgot him. The knowledge he gave double-armed me at the game. It became the reason of often riches in my hands, and was ever a resort when I erred over horse races or was beaten down by some storm of faro. Then it was profitably I recalled Casino Joe and his instructions; and his invincible secret of “How to tell the last four.”
“Is it not strange,” said the Jolly Doctor, when the Red Nosed Gentleman had finished, “that I who never cared to gamble, should listen with delight to a story of gamblers and gambling? But so it is; I’ve heard scores such in my time and always with utmost zest. I’ll even tell one myself—as it was told me—when it again becomes my duty to furnish this good company entertainment. Meanwhile, unless my memory fails, it should be the task of our descendant of Hiawatha”—here the Jolly Doctor turned smilingly to Sioux Sam—“to take up the burden of the evening.”
The Old Cattleman, joining with the Jolly Doctor in the suggestion, and Sioux Sam being in no wise loth to be heard, our half-savage friend related “How Moh-Kwa Fed the Catfish.”
CHAPTER XV.—HOW MOH-KWA FED THE CATFISH.
One day Moh-Kwa, the Wise Bear, had a quarrel with Ish-koo-dah, the Fire. Moh-Kwa was gone from home two days, for Moh-Kwa had found a large patch of ripe blackberries, an’ he said it was prudent to stay an’ eat them all up lest some other man find them. So Moh-Kwa stayed; an’ though he ate very hard the whole time an’ never slept, so many an’ fat were the blackberries, it took two suns to eat them.