"Cato reached down, picked up his partner by the scruff of the neck, and held him out at arm's length.
"'I ain't a-goin' to play no poker, old man,' says he to Stillwater. 'Won't touch no cards at all till I git back. Kind o' lost my knack at the cards lately, anyhow,' as if he ever had any knack at 'em. 'And you want to let the red-eye alone while I'm gone, too,' Cato finished, and then set his little partner down. Then Cato went aboard the boat. As I was going along down to St. Louis myself, Stillwater calls me aside and says to me:
"'Jest keep an eye on that big galoot on the way down, and if he gits restless and shows an inclination to get tangled up with a poker deck, jest bat him over the head with a capstan bar.'
"But I wasn't making any rash promises like that. Well, Cato was all right the first day out, and he followed his pardner's instructions and sat around on deck smoking his corn-cob pipe and feeling his big wallet occasionally. He kept as far away as possible from the little deck-house where a game was started going before the boat pushed out into the stream, but the rattle of the chips was bound to reach his ears occasionally. On the second day some stockmen got aboard that Cato knew, and Cato took a few drinks with 'em. Then they invited Cato into a little game. Cato looked at me kind o' guilty like, and then shook himself together like a man does that says to himself, 'It's nobody's danged business but my own.' So he sits into the game with the stockmen. They were only going down a few landings, and when they got off they had $2000 of Cato's money. I never in my life before or since saw such hoodoo luck as Cato had in that game with those stockmen. He didn't get a pair more'n once in a hundred hands, and if he did get a pair and happened to better it in the draw he'd give a hoot that 'ud wake up the owls ashore and then bet like an Ogallala Sioux with four aces and a dirk knife. It was just simply painful to watch Cato in that game, and no mistake. When the stockmen got off some of them actually looked so sorry for Cato that I kind o' thought they'd offer to give him his money back. But they didn't.
"'I'm kind o' out o' luck lately,' says Cato to me after the stockmen had got off with his $2000, 'and I b'lieve I'll just draw in now and wait for a hunch. No good buckin' agin' a streak o' bad luck, is there?'
"Well, I told him that if my 10-year-old boy down in Sioux City wasn't able to play poker any better than he, Cato, could before he put on long trousers and suspenders I'd send him up to a lumber camp until he became of age. But Cato didn't pay any attention to me, and when an awkward, overworked-looking man, dressed like a farmer, got aboard a couple of landings below he struck up an acquaintance with him. This farmer-like looking man had a pretty keen pair of eyes in his head, as I noticed, and he had besides that yokelly way of finding out about other people's business. So it didn't take him long to dig it out of Cato that Cato was going down to St. Louis to buy a stock of goods. The three of us were sitting on the hind rail, whittling, when this farmer-like looking man turns to Cato and asks him:
"'Ever play key-ards?'
"Cato looked at me again and hesitated.
"'Oh, wunct in a while,' says he, finally, and in a pair of minutes they were in the middle of a poker game. The stranger asked me to sit in, of course, but I could see that he wasn't over-anxious to have me in the game, and I never played poker on steamboats, stern-wheel or side-wheel, anyhow.
"Cato's hoodoo luck followed him right along in his game with the overworked-looking man, who seemed to me to have considerable of a job covering up a natural sort of deftness he had in handling a pack. The two played for three or four hours, the stranger announcing occasionally that he was going to get off at the next landing, so's to screen himself from the inference that he was getting cold feet, probably. He was about $1000 ahead of Cato's game when the boat was nearing his landing.